Circuit Of Heaven (13 page)

“It was wonderful. I met someone.”

“Ah! A young man, no doubt.”

“Yes.”

“I’m delighted for you.” He leaned forward on his cane, looking up into her eyes. “But you don’t seem so delighted yourself.”

“It’s nothing. We just met.”

“Doesn’t sound like nothing.” He gestured with his cane to a bench beside the fountain, and they sat down. He propped his cane against the bench and leaned back, stretching out his legs. “I’m all ears,” he said.

She told him about Nemo, from the moment she first saw him until they kissed good night. Off and on all day, she’d tried to put her feelings in perspective: You’re just lonely, Justine, infatuated. You can’t trust this sudden passion. But as she talked to Mr. Menso, she was soon caught up in her own story, just as the play had carried her along, and she felt everything she’d felt the night before all over again. Especially the hopelessness of it all. She was afraid she might start crying again.

“Why so upset, Justine? It sounds to me as if you’ve fallen in love with an exceptional young man.”

“He lives in another world, Mr. Menso. This morning I imagined going to see him there. It was wonderful. I wanted it more than anything, but I can’t. It’s impossible. The whole thing’s impossible. He probably won’t even come tonight.”

Mr. Menso shook his head back and forth and sat up straight, taking his cane in hand. “You are so young. First of all, I’ll wager he comes to see you tonight, and that he’s every bit as bewitched by you as you are by him—more so if he’s got any sense. And as for visiting his world, try this.” He handed her a card:
Real World Tours—We Never Close
. There was a phone number and an address. “Friends of mine. Tell them Warren sent you. And tell this Nemo that Mr. Menso says to take you home and show you where he lives—if his intentions are honorable.”

She smiled at him. “You’re very sweet, Mr. Menso, but Nemo doesn’t want to get involved with me.”

He snorted. “Since when does a young man’s feelings have anything to do with what he wants? Sounds to me like he’s already ‘involved,’ as you so unromantically put it. Whatever happened to falling in love? ‘Get Involved.’ Bah! Is that what happened to Romeo and Juliet—they Got Involved?”

“But Mr. Menso, that’s a play.”

He danced his eyebrows and made an arc around them with a sweep of his cane. “Haven’t you heard? It’s all a play. We make it up as we go along.” He winked at her. “So we might as well make it beautiful, don’t you think?”

“What if Nemo doesn’t see it that way?”

Mr. Menso chuckled and put his hand on hers. “You are the east, my dear. You are the sun. Whatever he sees from now on is bathed in your light.” He patted her hand and rose to his feet. “I must be going. I’m meeting a customer at my shop. He’s looking for a copy of
Anna Karenina
for his wife’s birthday, and I have a beauty. Odd present, it seems to me, for a husband to give, but perhaps he hasn’t read it. Don’t worry, Justine. Things will go splendidly this evening. Lovers find a way.”

After he’d gone, Justine watched the dolphins in the fountain, thinking about what Mr. Menso had said. The dolphins’ play didn’t seem to be random, she noticed after a while. They went through a cycle of about ten minutes duration. She watched them perform their dance three times, then walked slowly back to her hotel.

WHEN
SHE
GOT
BACK
TO
HER
ROOM
SHE
TRIED
ALL
THE
NUMbers in her address book, but still no one answered. She left a message for her agent to call her, though she wasn’t sure why. Just to have somebody to talk to, she guessed. She thought back to the orphanage, all the girls she knew there. Surely one of them was in here now, probably most of them. That seemed to be the only time in her life she remembered with any clarity. She took out a sheet of stationery and made a list of the names she could remember. She punched the info icon on the phone and accessed the Bin database. With the third namd on her list, she had success. Stephanie Ann Boyd lived in Seattle. She was a year younger than Justine. They hung out a lot when she was sixteen and seventeen. They’d both been wild, getting into a lot of trouble together. She entered the number and after a few rings Stephanie’s face appeared on the screen. She was the girl Justine remembered, but grown up—midthirties, she would guess, but you couldn’t tell by looking in here. Maybe she liked looking older.

“Hi, Stephanie,” she said. “It’s Justine.”

Stephanie stared for a moment. “Do I know you?”

“In Dallas, at St. Catherine’s.”

“I’m sorry. That’s been so long ago. I’m afraid I really don’t remember you.”

“Come on Steph, it hasn’t been that long. It was only a few years ago. Remember we snuck out to see Bruce and—what was that guy’s name—Alfonso. We got caught, remember?”

Stephanie drew back as if struck, studied Justine with knitted brows. “I left St. Catherine’s almost eighty years ago, and I knew no one there named Justine. I’m sorry, you must have me confused with someone else with the same name. The Bin’s a big place, you know.”

“But I recognize you. I mean you’re older, but you’re the Stephanie I remember.”

“I’m afraid that’s quite impossible. I’ve been in here for almost thirty years. I’m sorry.” The screen went blank. Justine didn’t bother trying to find any of the other names on her list. She lay down on her bed and stared out the window at the darkening sky, waiting for night to fall.

NEMO
WOKE
IN
THE
MORNING
THINKING
OF JUStine. Not thinking, actually. Longing for her. Half awake—his reason still asleep—he basked in the anticipation of seeing her again, kissing her, holding her, making love to her. But as he became lost in this fantasy, as the image grew clearer, he saw them making love in some perfect Bin hotel room, entwined in some vast bed with crisp clean sheets, sitting propped up afterwards on plump down pillows, sipping Turkish coffee or cognac or whatever they damn well pleased. It was harder to see them getting up out of that bed, doing anything in there but wandering around being happy, like a couple of potheads with the harvest in. In the Bin, the harvest was always in. It was
The Grasshopper and the Ants
, only winter was cancelled, and the ants were all but extinct. Eventually they’d settle down in a “Shakespeare” of their own. They’d order the growing ivy, of course. They could always change it to the nongrowing if it got to be too much trouble. After a while, they’d be nongrowing, too, because anything else would be too much trouble.

He sat up in bed. The weather had cleared, and the sun was in his face. His windup alarm clock on the bedside table said it was 8:30, but he hadn’t set it for weeks, and the rusty gears inside ran slow. He studied the sun and set the clock for 9:00, giving the key a couple of cranks. If he didn’t overwind it, Lawrence told him, it’d run forever. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stared at the floor, then squinted into the sun. His reason was awake now, but it didn’t matter. The longing still gnawed at him. He couldn’t wait to see her again, even as he was thinking he had no choice but to break things off before they went any further.

He got out of bed and stood in the cool breeze from the window, looking through his CDs until he found Aimee Mann’s. Most of the liner notes were gone except for a few frayed panels from her first solo album—she smiled at the camera with Justine’s smile, Justine’s eyes. He dug through his desk and found a magnifying glass, studied her eyebrows, her teeth, the precise line of her jaw, her shoulders clad in black. Justine was younger, but this looked like a photograph of her or her twin. He’d heard of people making themselves look like famous people in the Bin, though it was a fad that’d passed. It was a drag to run into yourself at a party. But Justine seemed genuinely surprised when he told her she looked like Mann.

He put the CD in the machine and started it. He opened the old refrigerator where he stored books and papers. Lawrence had picked it up to salvage the tubing. Nemo ripped the compressor out to make it lighter and dragged it up the stairs. It kept everything dry. His room leaked badly, but Lawrence was too big to crawl around on the slate roof, and Nemo was afraid of heights. Sooner or later he’d have to get over it and fix the damn leak, unless he wanted to move back to his old bedroom. He checked the water level in the pan on top of the refrigerator. It was good for another rain at least.

His grandmother’s diaries were in a neat row in the freezer compartment, eight of them, one for every year from 1998 to 2005. He’d read them all several times, but he hadn’t looked at them much in the last few years. Rosalind sulked when he did, though she’d never admit it. Who could be jealous of diaries? And they were pretty strange. In the early ones she wrote about wild, improbable adventures with her mother. Other times, she talked as if she didn’t have a mother. Other times, she talked as if she didn’t have a mother. She nearly always wrote about boys. She might’ve been living on Mars from all Nemo learned from her diaries, though he gathered she was at some kind of boarding school, which she consistently referred to as “Jail.”

Nemo had asked his mom about when his grandmother was a little girl, and his mom had said darkly, “Your grandmother was never a little girl.” Nemo had no idea what she meant, but he knew not to ask any more questions, and his mom had been in a foul temper for the rest of the day.

He remembered she wrote in her diaries about the Aimee Mann CDs. They were special to her; that’s what had first made them special to him. If he remembered right, they were a gift from some guy. After a brief search, he found the entry he was looking for:

AUGUST
31, 2003

N is so sweet! He gave me all of Aimee Mann’s CDs today. He teased me that he just wanted to get his back, but I know that’s not true. He’s such a good friend. But I’m kind of afraid he’s falling in love with me. I’ve caught him looking at me with great moony eyes. Hope not—wouldn’t want to lose my best friend. I don’t know what I’d do without him.
I wonder

He worked his way back through ‘02 and ’01 to see who this N was. He showed up often. And it sure sounded to Nemo like he was in love with her. Whenever she broke up with another boyfriend, which she did about once every two months, she’d call up N and cry on his shoulder and get him to distract her by taking her to the zoo or a movie or a swim in the lake, and all the time she’d be talking about some other guy and telling N what a pal he was. And he’d do it every time, even get her some little gift to cheer her up. Nemo felt sorry for the guy, whoever he was. If it ever occurred to her that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, she never let on in her diaries.

N was also the one who’d introduced her to Aimee Mann in the first place:

SEPTEMBER
21, 2002

N and I talked a long time about music. I told him I wanted to be a singer, and he didn’t laugh at me like some jerks I could mention. He loaned me the coolest CDs by his all-time favorite singer, Aimee Mann. I love her stuff! It’s real pop, but with this edge. I wish I could write songs like that, and she’s so cool looking. It’d be cool to be her. Except, I don’t know. Lot of her songs are pretty sad
.

I like having a friend like N who’s different from me, knows about stuff I don’t know about. D says he’s a geek, but what does he know? Asshole
!!

Nemo didn’t know who D was, but her opinion of him was unwavering throughout her diaries. But if N wasn’t a geek or gay or something, why was he always the guy she called when she didn’t want a date but didn’t want to be alone? The first mention of him was about a year before she finally figured out he’d fallen for her:

SEPTEMBER
2, 2002

A was right. N is real sweet, kind of funny looking though. But he said he can help me get rid of my nightmares. He said that what S pulled was wrong and I should tell the cops. But I just want to forget about it. I mean, I was just as much to blame as he was I guess. I could’ve saidno
.

Yeah, sure. That’s me alright
!

The entry before that was over a week earlier:

AUGUST
24TH, 2002

S has turned out to be the supreme asshole of assholes. I went to A and cried buckets. When she got through telling me I
TOLD
YOU
SO eight million times, she said her brother knew a guy who might help me out and she’d set it up for me to meet him. She said he was a
GENIUS
, and he’d know what S did to me, and if anybody could fix it, he could. Sure hope so. I haven’t slept in three days. Everytime I fall asleep that slimy toad is all over me
.

S was a boy she’d had a crush on for some weeks. There wasn’t really much about him except that she thought he was good looking, he had his own place, and he was into virtuals, which were just getting started about that time. She never said what he did to her, never said if A’s friend, who Nemo took to be N, fixed it or not. But even from the beginning, apparently, she’d gone to N because someone else let her down, and he never did. Nemo couldn’t remember a single disparaging word about N. He picked up a couple of the later diaries to see if N continued to show up every time she had a broken heart, but Lawrence hollered up the stairs that breakfast was ready.

NEMO
AND
LAWRENCE
ATE
BISCUITS
AND
GRAVY
AND
RABbit sausages. There was even a pot of coffee. As they were finishing up, Lawrence told Nemo he’d traded a rebuilt generator for two two-pound cans of Chock Full o‘ Nuts. “And this little baby here,” he added with a grand flourish, setting a red-and-white box wrapped in cellophane on the table.