"You ever hear the old rule, 'Love thy neighbor,' Daphne?"
"Sure."
Her right ankle was farthest from him, and he reached in under the chair to loop tape around the cuff of her jeans and the chair leg.
"How are you supposed to do that, really?" He pressed the edge of the tape down firmly. "Lots of neighbors aren't very nice."
"Well, you can love them without liking them, my dad says."
With a ripping sound, he unrolled another length of tape, and she heard his teeth click as he bit it off. He taped her left ankle to the chair leg.
"Your daddy's right. Did you ever have a cat or dog die, that you loved? Well, your mom died, didn't she?"
"Yes." Daphne took a deep breath and let it out.
"But God loves us, right? That's what everybody says." He pulled her right wrist down until it was against a slat of the chair's back, and grunted as he worked a piece of tape between the slats.
"Right," said Daphne. "God loves us."
"But He kills our cats and our dogs and our mothers. Pretty cruelly too, sometimes! Why is He always doing shit like that? I'll tell you a secret."
"I don't want to hear any secrets." Daphne was keeping her voice steady only with an effort.
Now Canino was holding her left wrist against the outside chair-back slat, and he was able to tape it down more quickly.
"It's like neighbors. God loves us, but He doesn't like us. He doesn't like us at all."
Suddenly Daphne was aware of her father's love and urgent concern, and she knew he had been radiating these for at least the last several seconds.
I'm okay, Dad, she thought, hoping he could catch the thought. She told herself not to be afraid, since her father could sense her fear. God might not like her, as Canino had said, but her father did.
Canino straightened up. "I'm going to have to turn off the light," he said, "but you can look through that length of pipe at Palm Springs. See?" He switched off the overhead lightbulb and stepped back, out of the tent.
Daphne peered into the plastic tube, and there were the distant lights of the city, far, far below.
"I'll come out and see how you're doing in a while," Canino said. He let the tent flap fall closed, and then she heard his boots scuff on the truck-bed boards, crunch into the dirt, and recede away.
Daphne stared longingly at the remote lights of restaurants and theaters and homes, and clung to her father's mind.
Fred was leaning against the cabin wall in the gathering darkness. Canino stopped beside him and pulled a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket.
"What with that music and the synchronized lights and all," Canino said, "she'll be pretty dissociated, come dawn. Have a couple of the guys get that piece of oiled glass down the hill. You stay here." He stretched. "I'm gonna get a beer, you want a beer?"
"I don't drink. The plan is to proceed with negating her?" Fred waved toward the truck and the tent.
"Oh shit yes. We can't negate Charlotte — she's been involved too long, we'd lose years. She's stupid, or she thinks we are. Hell, she's the one who fucked over that old guy in New Jersey, to get us the Einstein papers from Princeton! Remember, the old guy killed himself in jail afterward? Would we have got those papers anyway, without Charlotte? Maybe, maybe not. And negating Charlotte wouldn't stop this kid from having burned up the Chaplin movie. Nah, it's gotta be the girl."
"Kill her father?"
"Sure, why not? There's no way he won't be coming along with Charlotte tomorrow morning, so that should be easy. But," he added, laughing softly, "by tomorrow noon he'll be alive again, in a brand-new world. He just won't ever have had a daughter."
Twenty-four
The twelve-sided motel room was crowded. Frank Marrity and Charlotte sat on the double bed with an ashtray on the bedspread between them, Lepidopt and Malk sat on the carpeted floor, and old Mishal was rubbing his eyes at the lamplit desk by the bathroom door. On the far side of the bed, blocking one of the knee-level windows, stood the concrete block Marrity had last seen in his grandmother's shed. Somebody had apparently been shooting at it since then — it was pocked and cracked in the right handprint and in the imprint of the cane, and the S in Sid had almost entirely been chipped off. Alongside the block were stacked four cardboard moving boxes with old cloth-insulated wires trailing out of the tops. The light in the narrow ceiling threw an antiquating sepia radiance over everything.
Marrity's Einstein letters lay on the table in front of Mishal, each page now in a clear plastic sleeve.
"I've read the letters," Mishal said, leaning back from the desktop lamp that had made his face look like a skull. "They're supplemental. Valuable, but Einstein assumed his reader already knew a lot of things we don't know."
"I notice he gives page numbers for something called Grumberg's Fairy Tales, said Lepidopt. "I could look that up."
"His handwriting was no good," said Mishal. "That's 'Grimm bros,' and I know what story he's referring to. It's 'Faithful John,' in which crows are represented as being able to see the past and future. Sequential events are on the ground, along roads the characters have to travel, but the crows live in a higher dimension, and can see what's in the future and past of the characters. He's explaining higher-dimensional perspective to his daughter." He stretched. "Bert, did I see you making coffee?"
Malk leaned forward to look into the bathroom. "It'll be ready any minute."
"We won't be having any for a while yet. And," Mishal went on, "Einstein mentions having told Roosevelt — Einstein calls him the king of Naples in the letters, it's all in terms of characters out of The Tempest — having told him about the atomic bomb, but he says he didn't tell Roosevelt about this other thing he's discovered, which is the time machine. Or maybe it's the singularity you told us about," he said, nodding to Charlotte. "Most likely they're both parts of the same thing. Right before his death in 1955 he writes that he's talked to 'NB,' who visited in October, and he says NB fortunately has no clue about the time-machine possibility inherent in the math. Niels Bohr visited Einstein in October of '54." He squinted at Marrity. "Basically all he does in the letters is tell your grandmother why she should destroy the machine in her shed."
"She tried to," said Marrity, "at the end."
"And he mentions 'the Caliban who is your chaste incubus,'" Mishal said. "That's the thing that showed up on your daughter's hospital-room TV set?"
"Maybe," said Marrity. "It quoted one of Caliban's lines from The Tempest. You heard it," Marrity said to Lepidopt.
Lepidopt nodded. "And it was trying to get your daughter to let it into her mind. It said, 'the mountains are burning,' and 'when the fires are out it will be too late.' It's what your grandmother died to get rid of — she jumped sideways, as it were, across space instead of time, and she scraped the Caliban thing off, like a psychic barnacle." He remembered that poor Bozzaris had been amused by the phrase, when they had talked in Newport Beach — only about twelve hours ago! "And the so to speak friction of it started all these fires in the mountains."
"Caliban," said Marrity. "What is it?"
"It's pretty clearly a dybbuk," said Mishal wearily. "More correctly dybbuk me-ru'ah ra'ah, the cleaving of an evil spirit. More correctly still, it's an ibbur, the spirit of a man who has no proper place in the world, and has to find a host to cling to, to live in." He looked at Lepidopt. "Are the fires still burning in the mountains?"