“Lust.”
“Gluttony.”
“Greed.”
“Sloth.”
“Wrath.”
“Envy.”
“Pride.”
One by one, seven girls counted down what they had learned by rote rather than experience — although later I discovered that many of them had experienced much in the days before they had been rescued and brought to Santa Sabina.
“Ready?” Tibor asked us.
Twelve vigorous nods.
“Go!” he said. And with that, eleven girls ran off. Only I stayed, looking straight up past the beard and the hair into Tibor’s eyes.
“Didn’t you understand?” he asked me, speaking more distinctly, kindly even. I nodded again, and he turned to one of the women at his flank. But I stood there, and the woman signaled to Tibor. Now when he turned, the kindness turned to impatience.
“What?” he asked.
“I have found them,” I said. “You asked for an example of the seven deadly sins. I have found it.”
Tibor’s first reaction was incomprehension. I’m not sure that at ten years of age I understood completely. All I knew was that all the human frailties that Sister Francesca Splendida and our other teachers had warned us against were bound together by spiderweb and spit and the glue that holds together bird’s nests and the insides of atoms, bound inside the dark, dark energy of the dark, dark man sitting in front of me. Tibor understood. I saw the moment when Tibor understood. It was a moment of fear, a moment of discovery. But once discovered, once uncovered, Tibor smiled. It was a smile of recognition. Recognition of his sinful frailty. Recognition that I was someone who knew him, who, perhaps, was even a part of him, a potential companion in sin, a comfort.
“So.” The voice came to me thirteen years later, as I stood on a flattened boulder at the edge of the creek, mumbling past the first chirps of the morning birds as the air began to resuscitate the waking forest. “So.” I knew he was dead. I had seen the body before I ran, had seen it at least up to the lower jaw, the loose linen trousers and shirt, the empty tumbler, the specs sightless on the arm of the Adirondack chair, and above a darkness more complete than his beard and hair had ever been. “So.” I knew he was dead, but still the voice, the breath. “Did you find it, Ottavia?” Another treasure hunt. But what was I hunting?
While Malory was sleeping on that afternoon a month before, I took the gift he had brought me from Rome — the flash drive containing The Complete History of Septimania—and plugged it into my laptop in the cabin by the creek. I read again the Tale of Judar that Haroun had told Aldana. Like me, Judar was good at finding things. He found the three Moorish princes by the edge of Lake Karoon. And when the last of the princes survived, he traveled back to the Maghreb with him and found the treasure of Al-Shammardal, including the Magic Bag that held all the foods one could ever wish for. What did Tibor want me to find? The Magic Bag? I turned to ask him, but he was gone. He didn’t want to be found, or at least it wasn’t time.
I walked from boulder to boulder down the creek towards my cabin. Birds, early-morning shadows, water flowing slowly, still warm, even if the sun had passed into October. I opened the door and looked around my room. Muddy boot prints on the floor, powder and dust on all my books, the handles of my few pots. My toothbrush was missing. Someone had come searching for me, searching for my things.
I remembered the wheel.
Ten feet along the far bank of the creek, the shell of a Chevy 10 that had spent the past thirty years rusting into the leaves, stood wedged between a willow and a birch. Soon after I arrived at TiborTina, I realized that I needed a secret storage away from Tibor’s unexpected curiosity — the back rear wheel well of the rusting Chevy 10. The wheel was untouched, the leather pouch still there. I emptied the few contents onto my desk inside my cabin, the few things I valued — my passport, the marble apple from the Villa Septimania, a mosaic tile from Santa Sabina, the flash drive with The Complete History of Septimania.
But strangely, the treasures refused to stay still. As flat as my desk was, the flash drive slid down towards the floor, the passport flopped open, and the apple I had taken from the Villa Septimania resisted my attempts to set it down but rolled towards me, like a kitten insisting on being picked up. Only by securing them back in the leather pouch could I keep them from falling off onto the floorboards and through the cracks into the water. My treasures, I thought. Were they urging me to get out of the cabin, moving me away from the water as surely as Judar had moved away from Lake Karoon to a greater treasure? Were Judar and I adept at finding things, or were the things we’d found using us for their own purposes?
Holding the leather pouch, I crossed the meadow and went up the hill to the pond. The policemen, the others were long gone. I walked up the terrace. The wind had eddied the fallen leaves of the overhanging maples into hassocks along the steps. Some battered yellow police tape still cleaved to the rails. Everything had been cleaned at some point, cleaned of the worst before being abandoned once again.
I looked up. Or to be more precise, something made me look up, an unfelt hand that lifted my chin, until my eyes saw the spot, the spot on the overhang of the terrace, a single spot that must have missed the high-power hoses.
How many wonders happen as if by magic? I don’t know whether it was gravity or another force — the apple in the leather pouch that had only recently been suspended between the figures of the man and the woman in the Villa Septimania, the attraction of the treasure and the seeker, but a moment later the Pip separated from whatever bit of Tibor had glued it to the overhang and was in my hand. Was it the Pip I had seen Tibor swallow at the edge of the pond? The Pip that had found its way upward out of Tibor’s blasted head to the roof of the overhang of the terrace? The Pip that, as far as I could tell, had waited while I hid unconscious in the forest, until I rewired myself and returned to find it?
But as it fell into my palm, as I closed my fingers around the Pip, I saw something else. I saw what my nightmares in the forest had been telling. I saw the airplanes, I saw the towers, I saw the flames, the ashes of incinerated words, the falling bodies. I saw the man I had seen at the back of the Seven Veils, the man who had wanted to attack Tibor. And I saw other men, other women, hundreds of them. I looked down from the terrace and I saw what Tibor must have seen in his final moment — an entire history, an entire empire. Thousands of people, perhaps more, filling every edge of the TiborTina, ordinary men, ordinary women, children ranked as neatly as convent girls singing backup to the Rolling Stones, standing waist deep in the pond, perched on trees, spreading into the shadows of the forest, nested atop isolated columns above the crumbling ruins of ancient cities like seagulls awaiting the decline and the fall, circle after circle, as many as the fireflies. And in front of me, as an invisible DJ rode his volume pods up to eight, four unimaginably kick-ass girls in thigh-high boots and PVC mini-dresses pounded out the opening chords to a song whose lyrics I didn’t know but in a key I recognized, as unimaginable as that might be.
“So …” the voice said behind me. “You found it.” I reached back without looking, unwilling to see the half-face I was sure would greet me. I grabbed a microphone from his hand and stumbled forward, still unclear, wondering what I was meant to sing. I looked up towards the audience of thousands and saw her. There she was in the front row, the blonde woman from the Farmers’ Market, the woman I had seen talking with Malory by the pond. She smiled at me and the Pip grew warm in my hand. The apple glowed in my leather pouch. Her head swayed, her shoulders rolled softly to the music. She knew the girls in the band and she knew the words. She was my mirror and my teleprompter. Microphone gripped tight, I stepped forward as the spotlight picked me out from an impossible angle on the rising moon and I sang.