Nadine projected a new slide. A man approached the gates of a fabulous white city. Its marble ramparts glowed beneath a skull-faced moon.
George saw that the pilgrim was himself.
‘Even in this age of chaos,’ said Nadine, ‘there are places one can go to have one’s fertility restored. The earth has its marble cities.’
After swaddling the glass slides in a US Navy bath towel, Nadine slipped them into the pocket of her raincoat. She opened the side of the magic lantern, blew out the flame, and lowered the hot device into a canvas duffel bag.
‘Let me help you with that,’ he said.
She seemed not to hear. Slinging the bundle over her shoulder, she hobbled into the corridor. He followed her up a long spiral staircase. So great was his obsession with the thought of Holly’s reincarnation – Aubrey Paxton, predicted by Nostradamus, painted by Leonardo da Vinci, fathered by George Paxton, borne by Morning Valcourt – that he was taken aback upon seeing that Nadine had led him to the deck of the surfaced submarine. The air was choked with puffs of dark vapor. Waves detonated along the speeding prow. The wind stung his cheeks; it tugged his hair like a comb in the hands of a vindictive parent. God! So cold!
An open sailboat bobbed beside the hull, Nadine sitting in the stern. After hoisting the sail, she reached into her raincoat and pulled out a magic lantern slide, placing her gloved hand over the painted surface to protect it from spray. George took it like a starving man receiving bread.
‘How can I find that city?’ he called.
‘I have no idea,’ she replied, casting off.
‘Was this Nostradamus any good?’
‘He was on to something.’
A great, ever-expanding wedge of ocean and air grew between them. George looked at his Leonardo – the detail was astonishing, like the circuits on a computer chip, and he was especially impressed by the firm, crisp contours of Aubrey’s beautiful face. The wind quickened. Sea water began dripping from his hair. He moved the painting away before it got wet, tucked it under his shirt. When he glanced toward the horizon, Nadine Covington’s sailboat had become a firm white sliver beating its way south toward the horse latitudes.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘I had a happy childhood,’ said George at the beginning of his first treatment session.
‘Happy childhoods are overrated,’ his therapist replied.
When George first met her, he had found Morning Valcourt vaguely attractive, but now he saw that the surgical mask she wore during their encounter in the radiation unit had been covering cheeks littered with scab-like freckles, a nose that seemed always to be experiencing a stench, and a mouth perpetually poised on the brink of a snarl. Yet Leonardo had given her a warm smile… obviously an artist of formidable imagination.
‘I’ll be honest,’ she said. ‘Survivor’s guilt threatens its victims with sudden mental collapse. To prevent this, we must tear certain facts from the shadowland of denial, thrusting them into the daylight of consciousness.’
Could this pompous woman really be Aubrey’s mother? When would the warm smiling start?
‘Any trouble sleeping lately?’ she asked.
‘I used to suffer from somnambulism. A couple of ensigns cured me of that.’
‘What ensigns?’
‘Peach and Cobb. They said they’ve always been with me, waiting to get in.’
‘But you’re sleeping through the night?’
‘Yes.’
‘Losing weight?’
‘No.’
‘Bowels okay?’
‘Fine.’ It would take considerable ambition to fall in love with this woman.
‘I’ve been prescribing a lot of sedatives lately,’ she said, ‘but in your case I’d rather not. They found you clutching a golden scopas suit.’
‘I got it from an inventor. Professor Theophilus Carter. He made me sign a sales contract.’
‘I know. A confession of complicity. I don’t approve of such things. Tell me what happened after you left Carter’s shop.’
George sucked air across his teeth, making the roots ache. He spoke of searing light and a mushroom cloud, of fires, wounds, black dust, and cries for water, of people needing burn wards that no longer existed. A desperate pause followed each image, so that the hour was nearly up by the time he got to the smashed Giant Ride horse. ‘She loved that stupid thing,’ he said. Scar tissue grew in his throat.
‘It’s unendurable, isn’t it?’
The tenderness in Morning’s voice caught him by surprise. ‘Unendurable,’ he repeated.
‘Chicago winters got awfully cold,’ she continued softly, ‘but I had lots of books in the apartment, shelves floor to ceiling, so we were quite snug, me and the cats. I used to put all the warm authors on the windward side – Emily Dickinson, Scott Fitzgerald. Henry James gives off his own draft. I lived a block from my little sister – a Methodist minister and in her own way a better therapist than I. We called Linda the white sheep of the family. All I want is to be able to bury her.’ Leonardo was right: Morning could smile. This was not the joyful smile of the mother in the portrait, however, but the brave, taut smile of someone fighting tears. ‘Linda was the best person I ever knew.’
‘That would make a good epitaph. I keep wondering how they feel about being dead.’
‘Your wife and daughter?’
‘Yes, And the others.’
‘You wonder how they feel—?’
‘About being dead. That’s crazy, isn’t it?’
‘Do you think it’s crazy?’
‘They’re dead. They don’t feel anything about it… Sverre said there are pockets of survivors.’
‘No doubt.’
‘You don’t suppose—?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘I just thought—’
‘You entered the bomb crater, right? And then your neighbor shot you?’
George chomped on his lower lip. ‘I ended up on the ground. Next thing I knew, a vulture was hovering over me.’
‘A what?’
‘A vulture. A large black vulture – big as one of those flying dinosaurs, you know, the pterodactyls.’
‘The pterodactyls were not dinosaurs.’ She issued a succinct, intellectual frown. ‘Close enough. This is not the first time a vulture has entered the annals of psychotherapy. The species once haunted the great Leonardo.’
‘Leonardo da Vinci?’ George asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I have one of his paintings.’
‘You believe that you own an original Leonardo?’
‘I do own one. I keep it in my cabin.’
She gave her eyes a quick toss to the left, as if to say, Well, we have our work cut out for us, don’t we, you lunatic, and stood up. Her stiff and forbidding gray suit was like a whole-body chastity belt.
She walked to a bookcase stuffed with volumes on brain diseases. Her office reconciled the rational and the primal – an anatomy chart, a Navaho tapestry, a ceramic brain, a Hindu god, a biofeedback rig, an obsidian knife that had last seen employment in a human sacrifice. She removed a slender volume, flashed the title – Sigmund Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality – opened it. ‘When Leonardo was a baby,’ she said, ‘a vulture swooped down to his cradle and massaged his lips with its tail. Or so he believed. Did your vulture do that?’