King Maybe (21 page)

I put my forehead against the rim of the steering wheel and closed my eyes.

The amplified voice said, “Five. Four. I pay my patrol service very well, and they've got large shoulders and thick necks. Three.”

I turned off the ignition and got out of the car. It was actually a relief, having someone tell me what to do.

21

Some of Them Never Forgive Her for It

The metal door buzzed as I approached it. I hauled it open—it was heavy—and trekked down a short, dark hallway with a scuffed chocolate-linoleum floor and dirty walls painted that awful hospital green. At the end was a closed door on the left, a partly open door on the right, and, straight ahead, your basic service-station bathroom, door wide open to show the world a wall-mounted porcelain sink, yellowish beneath the faucet with minerals from LA water, and an old porcelain john, both from the forties. Straddling the opening of the toilet was one of those aluminum-legged hospital toilet seats with the rubber-cupped feet that are used by people who can't handle getting down to, or up from, a lower perch.

Through the door ajar to my right fell a narrow slice of light, almost thick with the nose-stopping stink of tobacco.

“Come in,” a woman called. She had a breathy voice, not in any intentional way, not for effect, but just from a lack of air to support it. I pushed the door open.

The room I entered, which seemed to be unoccupied, had once been a repair bay, its ancestry obvious from the hydraulic lift in the center of the floor. The area along the wall to my left, the back of the building, however, was domestic. It contained a hospital bed with side rails, the head raised to about a thirty-degree angle, that was rumpled and looked lived in, with books and magazines scattered across it. The bed stood on a very fine New England hooked rug with a stylized floral pattern, probably from the middle of the 1800s. Beside the bed stood a wheeled table littered with trays and dirty dishes, a couple of big glasses of water, and a little forest of pill bottles. Gleaming at the foot of the bed was a vessel of brass or copper that brought to my mind the imaginary chalice into which Jake dipped each morning to pull out the glowing seed of his day.

I went to the chalice and looked inside. It was full of bright-colored, slick little squares of paper, cut neatly but irregularly, mostly a couple of inches square. They seemed to be bits snipped from glossy magazines.

Where the rug ended, the original concrete floor of the repair bay began, chipped here and there where tools had been dropped, and uneven: a little damp in places and stained with ancient oil, the odor of which threaded its way though the malignant fog of the cigarettes. The long wall in front of me was covered from end to end and floor to ceiling by an enormous painting on what looked like a sheet of heavy plastic—perhaps thirty feet long and ten high—of a snow-covered desert that sloped down to the edge of a pale, ice-green sea. The sea stretched away to the east, behind the painter, so to speak, and the tall cacti threw long sunrise shadows across the bone-white snow, all the way to a jagged horizon that held back a blue-black sky with stars popping out of it. Probably because the plastic was so smooth, the painting had the hard, uniform sheen of enamel.

The painting aside, the most unusual thing in the room was the big, rough, wooden platform, covered with another very nice hooked rug, that had been built on top of the hydraulic lift dead center in the floor. The platform extended about ten feet in either direction down the long part of the room, but in width it was markedly lopsided: on one side it extended eight or nine feet, within a few inches of the wall where the painting hung, while on the other it was built out only a couple of feet. The short side had been counterweighted with a couple of big oil barrels full of hard cement so the platform wouldn't tip toward the painting. That freed up the space on the other half of the room, which was a mass of shelving jammed with cans of paint and solvents, brushes, mirrors, lenses—all sorts of paraphernalia for painting, projecting, and photographing images. A door stood open between the sets of shelves.

I stepped forward and took a good look at the painting: early morning in a frozen, empty desert. At the bottom of the picture—below the white snow, the dark shadows, and the black sky—the green of the sea almost made my eyes ring. Coming toward the water, increasing in size as they neared it, were footprints stamped into the snow, and lying at the water's edge was a small blue rectangle. I tried to make it out, but it was only roughed in, just a slap of blue, in sharp contrast to the almost photographic detail of everything else.

I said, “This is beautiful.”

“You think?” a woman said behind me. “I've looked at it so long I can barely see it anymore.”

“Why? You get stuck on it?” I turned to see a heavyset, oddly crumpled woman glide through the open door in a motorized wheelchair. Probably in her mid-sixties, but she could have been younger or older; her skin was smooth, but the muscles and tendons of her throat had loosened, and her jawline was a suggestion. She wore a singular full-length garment that owed a design debt to a nightgown, layers and layers of white tulle or whatever that gauzy stuff is that they use on ballerina's skirts. It buttoned at her plump throat, billowed out to fill the chair, and ended demurely at her sock-clad ankles, which were crossed. The gown had seen whiter days; it was dirty to the point of graying and smeared haphazardly with paint.

Bolted to the left arm of the wheelchair, in a rig designed specifically to hold it, was a battered forty-eight-ounce can produced decades ago to hold three pounds of Hills Bros. coffee. It had about five inches of brown water in the bottom, and a little flotilla of cigarettes sloshed back and forth as she powered up the wheelchair and headed past me toward the picture.

She studied the small blue rectangle for a few seconds as I looked down at the chop of salt-and-pepper hair, and then she said, “I never get stuck. I've been
interrupted
, that's all.”

“By me?”

She didn't look away from the painting. “Don't be silly.”

“What's that? The blue thing?”

“When I can get back to work,” she said, wheeling part of the way toward me and fishing a pack of Merits out of one of the layers of her garment, “It'll be Will's passport.”

“Footprints to the water and a passport right there?” I said. “Looks like a setup.”

She shook out a cigarette and lit it. Then she nodded acknowledgment. “It is. Will is a very undependable boy. It's a setup from the word go. Will is as alive as you are. In Verdinha, that is, so I suppose he is, as far as you're concerned, fictional.” She pointed the smoking tip of the cigarette at the picture. “The east coast of Verdinha. Temperate but with occasional cold winters. Language is derived from a sort of bastard Portuguese, religion has borrowed a lot of lace and brimstone from Catholicism, lot of guilt for leverage. Place has a kind of South American zeitgeist.”

“But you made it up,” I said.

She looked at me for a few seconds, and said, “I
painted
it. If that means to you that I ‘made it up,' have it your way.”

“Just out of curiosity, why is the picture so big?”

“Got your phone?” she said, blowing smoke away to her right. I've never understood why people who smoke blow the stuff away from them instead of just sitting happily in a cloud of it.

I tapped my shirt pocket. “Sure.”

“Get up on the platform. Center yourself and take a picture of it. A horizontal, obviously.”

I edged between the painting and the platform, stepped up, and fiddled with the phone. When I had all of it in the screen, I shot it.

“Well done,” she said. It wasn't exactly praise. “Now look at your phone. Does it look like a painting?”

“No. Looks like a photograph of a real place.”

“I'm good with perspective,” she said, “but the secret is that the painting is so big. By the time it gets shrunk down to photograph size, every detail has those hard edges you only see in photographic images. Whether it's a real place or not . . . well, that's a different question.”

“Amazing.” I looked at the painting from several angles. “So what's Will up to?”

“He's leaving Janet, I think. It's the first step in his new life. They're newlyweds, on their honeymoon, and he's planned this for months. There's a reason he's doing it in Verdinha. But this isn't why you're here. I don't suppose you smoke.”

“No.”

“Ahh, to have someone to puff with. Well, you'll have to put up with it.”

“Are you going to finish the details on the passport, or is it so small it doesn't matter?”

Her nostrils flared, a mannerism I'd read about but never actually seen before. “
Nothing
is so small it doesn't matter. My assistant quit, and the passport is too low for me to get to. Stuck in this chair, I can't bend down that far.”

“So what would your assistant do to help?”

“If I couldn't get to it by raising or lowering the hydraulic lift,” she said, “She'd raise or lower the
painting
. The whole thing is on rollers, like window shades, side to side as well as up and down. When I have an assistant, I can pretty much stay on the platform and let the painting come to me.”

“So,” I said, “this picture, as I understand it, becomes part of a portfolio, a trip to a nonexistent country—”

“No” she said, with some heat, “not a
nonexistent
country. A country I know about but you don't.”

“Fine. And there are other items in the folio—”

“Letters, tickets, snapshots, diaries, documents,” she said. “It's different from folio to folio, but there are always documents. No civilization can exist without documents. They're valuable because they tell you what people think is important.”

“And the items in your folio tell a story?”

She put the cigarette in her mouth and pursed her lips around it, then blew smoke out her nose. “They tell many possible stories,” she said, without removing the cigarette. “The people who look at one, or own it, manufacture their own stories, based on the documents and pictures and other things in the folio, letters or souvenirs or whatever tells them about what may have happened on the journey.” She shrugged. “Or may not have happened. Why Will dumps his bride, for example.”

“They buy the right to establish the truth,” I said.

She tilted her chin up. “Why not? It's up for sale everywhere else.”

“Can I see some of the documents for, uhhh . . .”

“Verdinha,” she said around the cigarette. “In the wooden box, up on the platform.”

The box, which was about nine inches by twelve and maybe three inches thick, was solid on all sides except the top, which had holes bored in it at regular intervals. “So something can breathe?” I said.

She shrugged again. “In your version of the story, maybe.”

I opened the box. There were some airline tickets, already torn for boarding, baggage tags, a handwritten letter, a couple of snapshots, a marriage certificate, and a US passport, its distinctive blue cover barely creased. I opened it and found myself regarding a picture—I would have said it was a photo, but now I wasn't so sure—of a bland-looking twenty-something male with a big jaw and small eyes, the kind of guy who gets hired part-time at Abercrombie & Fitch. His grin seemed half formed, as though he'd been snapped before he'd finished putting it on. “‘William Leinster,'” I read aloud. “Real name?”

She shrugged, but only one shoulder this time. “If you mean is there really someone named William Leinster, I'd say the odds are strongly in favor. If you mean is William Leinster really
that
person's name, or is it an alias . . . well, that's up to whoever owns, and thinks about, the folio.”

I flipped through the passport. It was stamped here and there in various faded shades of blue, black, and magenta, each dated and initialed. The countries were Loringia, Paronal, the Caliphate of Forania, Porraigne, and Outer Hester. “No stamp for Verdinha,” I said.

“Very observant. Part of the story, no doubt, another puzzle. Looks real, doesn't it?”

“Absolutely.”

“I'm going to roll myself over to the bed, and you're going to help me get up into it. I've been sleeping in this chair for days.”

“Because you haven't got your assistant?”

“Of course. I can get in and out of the chair on my own when nature raises its insistent head, but I can't lift myself high enough to get into bed. Once I'm up, we'll talk about the reason you're here.”

Following her directions, I got Garlin Romaine out of the chair and up into her messy bed, where she lay, breathing heavily and looking like a Victorian grandmother doll, if there was such a thing. She wrapped both hands around her left leg and towed it to the left, sweeping the magazines aside, then sighed. “What a relief. How bad do I smell?”

“Honestly? Through all the cigarettes, it's hard to tell.”

She gave a sharp little bark that sounded like practice for a laugh. “Showers. Something else my assistant used to help with.”

“If you don't mind my asking—”

“She couldn't take my smoking.”

“I didn't mean that. I—”

“Of course, you didn't,” she said. “Steeplechase accident. I was twenty-four. I went one way and the horse went the other, but somehow we ended in the same place, with Rocketeer—that was the horse—on top of me. Permanently disconnected all those tiny low-voltage lines that tell the bottom half of the body what to do.”

“Must have been awful.”

“I made it worse. I lay there for months and months, obsessing over all the places I'd never go, and I gradually realized that many of the ones I most wanted to see were places I'd never heard of. That was when I began seeing my countries.”

“How does it work?”

She scrunched her back against the pillows, and I got up, and she leaned forward as I put one behind her head. “At first I just saw them. They were
whole
, by which I mean they had their names, their climates, their topographies, cities, towns, languages, histories, religions, all that stuff. I started to draw them, and I kept that up until I taught myself to paint. And then it came to me that every country has documents. So I began to make documents, like Will's passport over there.”