Barely conscious of what he was doing he arranged and rearranged the cards in front of him, hoping some solution would appear. Nothing did. Despite the power of the symbols, or perhaps because of it, there was no clarity; just a sense that his mind was too lightweight to deal with such issues.
He was in the midst of these musings when the telephone rang. The Cobb household did not believe in answering machines, it seemed, because the ringing went on uninterrupted until Harry picked up.
There was a well-worn voice at the other end of the line. "Is Tesla there?" the man said. Harry paused before replying, during which time the man said, "It's urgent. I have to talk to her."
This time Harry recognized the speaker. "Grillo?" he said. "Who is this?"
11 "It' s Harry.
"Jesus, Harry. What are you doing there?" "Same thing Tesla's doing."
"is she around?" "She's asleep." "I have to talk to her. I've been calling all day." "Where are you?" "About five miles outside town."
"Which town?" "Everville, for God's sake! Now can I talk to her?"
"Can't you call back in an hour or so-"
"No!" Grillo yelled. Then, more quietly, "No. I need to talk to her now." "Wait a minute," Harry said, and putting down the phone he went up to wake Tesla. She was slumped on the double bed fully dressed, a look of such exhaustion on her sleeping face he couldn't bring himself to deny her the slumber she so plainly needed. It was a good thing. By the time he got back down into the hallway the line was dead. Grillo had gone.
In sleep, Tesia found herself walking on an unearthly shore. Snow had lately fallen there, but she felt none of its chill. Light-footed, she wandered down to the sea. It was thick and dark, its turbulent waters scummy@ and here and there she saw bodies in the surf, turning their stricken faces her way as if to warn her against entering.
She had no choice. The sea wanted her, and would not be denied. Nor, in truth, did she want to resist it. The shore was drear and desolate. The sea, for all its freight of corpses, was a place of mystery, It was only once she was wading into the surf, the waves breaking against her breasts and her belly, that her dreaming mind put words to what place this was. Or rather, one word.
Quiddity.
The dream-sea leapt up against her face when she spoke its name, and its undertow pulled at her legs. She didn't attempt to fight it, but let it lift her off her feet and carry her away like an eager lover. The waves, which were substantial enough at the shore, soon grew titanic. When they raised her up on their shoulders she could see a wall of darkness at the horizon, the likes of which she remembered from her last moments in Kissoon's Loop. The lad, of course. Mountains and fleas; fleas and mountains. When they dropped her into their troughs, and she plunged below the surface, she (,Iiinpsed another spectacle entirely: vast shoals of fish, moviii,, like thunderheads below her. And weaving between the shoals, luminous forms that were, she guessed, human spirits like herself. She seemed to see vestigial faces in their light; hints of the infants, lovers, and dying souls who were dreaming themselves here.
She had no doubt as to which of the three she was. Too old to be a baby, too crazy to be a lover, there was only one reason why her soul was journeying here tonight. Miss Perfection had been right, Death was imminent. This was the last time she would sleep before her span as Testa Bombeck was over.
Even if she'd been distressed at this, she had no time to feel it. The adventure at hand demanded too much of her attention. Rising and falling, on shoulder and in trough, she was carried on towards a place where the waters, for some reason she could not comprehend, grew so utterly calm they made an almost perfect mirror for the busy sky.
She thought at first she was alone in these doldrums, and was about to test her powers of self-propulsion in order escape them, when she realized that a light was flickering beneath her. She looked down into the water, and saw that some species of fish with luminous flesh had congregated in the deep, and was now steadily rising towards the surface. When she raised her head from the water again she found that she was not alone. A long-haired, bearded man was casually crouching on the water as though it were as solid as a rock, idly creating ripples in the glassy surface. He had been there all along, she assumed, and she'd missed him. But now, as if roused from some reverie by her gaze, he looked up.
His face was scrawny-his bones sharp, his black eyes sharper-but the smile he offered was so sweetly tentative, as though he was a little embarrassed to have been caught unawares, that she was instantly charmed. He rose, the water dancing around his feet, and ambled over to her. His watersoaked robes were in tatters, and she could see that his torso was covered with small, pale scars, as though he'd been wrestling in broken glass.
She sympathized with his condition. She too was scarred, inside and out; she too had been stripped of all she'd worn in the world: her profession, her self esteem, her certainty.
"Do we know each other?" he said to her as he approached. His voice lacked music, but she liked the sound of it nevertheless.
"No," she said, suddenly tongue-tied. "I don't believe so.
"Somebody spoke of you to me, I'm certain. was it Fletcher perhaps?"
"You know Fletcher?"
"Then it was," the man said, smiling again. "You're the one who martyred him."
"I hadn't thought of it that way-but yes, I guess that was me."
"You see)' he said. He went down on his haunches beside her, while the water buoyed her up. "You wanted connections, and they're there to be found. But you have to look in the terrible places, Testa. The places where death comes to take love away, where we lose each other and lose ourselves; that's where the connections begin. It takes a brave soul to look there and not despair."
"I've tried to be brave," she said.
"I know," he said softly. "I know."
"But I wasn't brave enough, is that what you're saying? The thing is, I didn't ask to be part of this. I wasn't ready for it. I was just going to write movies, you know, and get rich and smug. I guess that sounds pathetic to you."
"Why?",
"Well, I don't suppose you get to see a lot of movies."
"You'd be surprised," the man said with a little smile. "Anyway, it's the stories that matter, however they're told."
She thought of the child at the crossroads We saw your face, and we said: She knows about the story tree.
"What's the big deal about stofies?" she said.
"You love them," he said, his gaze leaving her face and slipping down to the water. The glowing forms she'd seen rising from below were within a few fathoms of the surface now. The water was beginning to simmer with their presence. "You do, don't you?" he said.
"I suppose I do," she said. "That's what the connections are, Testa."
"Stories?" "Stories. And every life, however short, however meaningless it seems, is a leaf-2'
"A leaf."
"Yes, a leaf." He looked up at her again, and waited, unspeaking, until she grasped the sense of what he was saying. "On the story tree," she said. -He smiled. "Lives are leaves on the story tree."
"Simple, isn't it?" he said. The bubbles were breaking all around them now, and the surface was no longer glacial enough to bear him up. He started to sink into the water; slowly, slowly. "I'm afraid I have to go," he said. "The 'shu have come for me. Why do you took so unhappy?"