Mount Terminus (11 page)

There they made dozens of short pictures. Novelty acts mostly. Dancing bears. Sword swallowers. Circus freaks. Sideshow featurettes, he called them. Freed purchased Kinetoscopes from the Edison Manufacturing Company, which he lined up in the lobbies of his theaters, and in his new machines he presented his productions. He was so impressed by the return on his investment, he started converting his theaters into motion picture palaces. He realized if he could make his pictures last the duration of a theatrical performance, he could run them through the day and late into the night, and collect a continuous source of revenue at a fraction of the expense of putting on live acts.

When Edison Studios learned Sam Freed had gone into the picture business, they started after him for unfair use of their equipment. Freed simply did what every other production company did: he sent his crew off to traverse country byways and make pictures out of the reach of Edison's lawyers. Soon enough, it became apparent to him, he could further cut his costs if he had a fixed base of operation. He wanted to eliminate the fees his itinerants were laying out to local townships—the bribes paid to politicians, the location payments made to property owners, the rates for lodging and food. He realized his overhead would be significantly lower if they consolidated everyone in one place and remained stationary on a single plot of land. It just so happened, at the time he began to dream of a permanent place in the sun, he sent his men to collect his annual alms from me, but on the day they arrived at the bank, they discovered I wasn't there. Mother had already passed away, and seeing as Freed no longer had any leverage over us, I no longer had cause to continue paying him.

When they saw Jacob wasn't at the bank, the elder Rosenbloom explained, Freed's men went to the house in Woodhaven, where they saw Bloom and his father board a carriage bound for the train station. They followed them there, and, after making a few inquiries, learned where they were going. Freed sent a telegram to one of his production teams, and they sent the three men who had been observing them. They reported back about what was on Mount Terminus—open land drenched in light, coastal desert kept alive by an eternal spring—and not long after that, they learned about Jacob's holdings at the lake up near Mojave. Several times they approached Jacob in town and tried to influence him to sign over a portion of the Mount Terminus property and the water rights to the lake. They threatened to implicate him in Leah's death in place of Rachel. But Jacob refused to give in to their pressure. They eventually offered him money for both the land and access to the water, and he refused them still, as he couldn't imagine parting with either property for the sentimental reasons that precipitated him to purchase them in the first place.

But as I watched you grow older and more self-aware, said the elder Rosenbloom, the more I was reminded of the loneliness I knew as a child, and the more I recalled the longing I felt to be rejoined with your mother and her sister, the need I felt to be reconnected to the only true family I had ever known. And the more I was reminded of the routines in which I had cycled through alone for such a long period of time, the more insurmountable the regret I felt for having concealed from you that you had a brother, the more I regretted and reproached myself for having abandoned Simon to my blackmailer. I no longer could pretend I had done something noble by sacrificing my child for your mother's welfare. I could no longer ignore the truth. Without a struggle, without voicing any opposition, I'd deposited an innocent child, my own flesh and blood, into the hands of an unscrupulous thug whose only motive for wanting the boy was to harm me, and your mother, for the roles we played in Leah's death. I could no longer ignore the fact that I owed Simon more than I could possibly provide him. There was no material recompense adequate enough. And so, in the end, I agreed to provide
him
, not Freed, the land and the water rights to bring the two of you together and help him realize his dreams.

Which are what? asked Bloom.

Pictures, said Jacob. He makes pictures. And down there, he will be able to do as he pleases. With you. If that's what you wish.

But why sacrifice the lake?

Because he has plans for it. But, more important, because he knows what it means to me.

*   *   *

When the elder Rosenbloom had finished his confession, he fell quiet for a long while, presumably waiting for Bloom's response. Bloom could see in his father's face that he needed him to express some assurance that he'd one day find it within himself to accept the complicated history of their family and forgive him. But, as Jacob rightly anticipated when imagining this moment all these years, Bloom found himself caught in a schism taking shape in his mind. On the one hand, he was filled with compassion and pity for his father. He had seen in what ways the great abyss at the core of his story had taken its toll on him. For this reason Bloom was compelled to find words to comfort him. But he couldn't. What, after all, did one say to the figure of such a tragedy? How did one console a Hamlet or a Lear or an Othello? Even if he could find the right words, he wondered if he'd share them. He couldn't help but ask himself if the preservation of his memories, of the way Bloom perceived him and his mother, was reason enough to conceal from him the fact that Simon existed, that Bloom wasn't alone in the world. Certainly he would have been capable of forgiving his mother's frailties, of comprehending the circumstances surrounding the choice his father was forced to make. But now he couldn't help but think selfishly, of what had been lost to him in the passage of time. For the entirety of his life, he had a brother, and knew nothing of him, not even his name. And when he reflected on this, Bloom wasn't convinced there was a sensible explanation sufficient to provide this episode a heartening conclusion. He had never before felt distrustful of his father. He had never before thought it was possible he would give him cause to feel this way. But he had. He had deceived him. Intentionally designed an illusion in which he had been dwelling for the entirety of his life.

There were a great number of thoughts and emotions Bloom wanted to express, none of which squared with the relationship he had had with Jacob. No words he possessed could properly articulate his disappointment, his confusion, his anger. All he could think to do, therefore, was contain his true sentiments and say what he would have said on some other occasion preceding this one, one with which he was more familiar. In a controlled manner, with as much hope in his voice as he could summon, Bloom said, We'll find our way past this.

Will we? said Jacob circumspectly.

Yes, said Bloom. We will. I'm certain of it.

Unable to say anything more than this, Bloom backed away from his father. At the door, he turned and climbed the stairs to his bedroom, inside which he stared out the window into the night sky and in it he saw the nightmare of miniatures his mother had painted for his father's devices, his mother running from Leah's shadow, on her knees before her, begging for forgiveness, and he recalled more clearly the emptiness in her eyes when he was a young child. He could see now, they were the eyes of a woman whose heart had been irreparably harmed, whose spirit had been crushed by her own hand. So devastated, he thought, not even the abiding love of a child, Bloom's love, could repair it.

*   *   *

For almost a year, the top of Mount Terminus filled with industry. In Simon's absence, concrete poured into foundations, lumber arrived by the cartload, plumbers and electricians, carpenters and masons overtook the camps, and while they remained in residence, geometric skeletons cast higher and longer shadows onto the mountain. Technicians erected poles along the edge of the road and connected them with high-tension wire spun out from man-sized spools. After some time, the glow of electrified light illuminated the night sky a bright hue of orange, so that from Bloom's bedroom window it appeared as if the sun were always about to rise over the ridge.

Ever since the night Jacob had recounted the circumstances that led him to abandon Simon, Jacob, perhaps out of respect for Bloom's need to absorb what he had learned, perhaps because he sensed in what way Bloom's estimation of him had been lowered, perhaps so as not to burden his son any further, removed himself to seclusion and returned to his routines. He returned to his gardens, where, to dull the noise of the construction, he stuffed tufts of cotton into his ears, and when he could no longer stand even the muted drumbeat of labor echoing from the plateau, he locked himself away for the remainder of the day in the gallery, where, as a form of penance, Bloom speculated, he stared into his mother's Woodhaven landscapes to recall his wife gazing vacantly at the countryside without seeing its beauty or feeling the possibility of its sanctuary, seeing, rather, visions of her sister. In the gallery, the elder Rosebloom drank. From Manuel Salazar's chamber Bloom watched him drink until he could drink no more, and as the construction beat on, as its noise continued to disturb his father's communion with the two women he'd loved since before he could remember being alive, as the sounds of the pneumatic drills bored deeper into his interior, he visited the gallery earlier and earlier, oftentimes falling unconscious well before the sun dipped below the horizon.

Bloom witnessed his father surrender. In the furrows of his brow, in the gauntness of his cheeks, in the dark depressions under his eyes. He could clearly see drain from the elder Rosenbloom's body what remained of its vitality. It was as if the telling of his story had released him from his obligation to his son. It was the withholding of this information, it occurred to Bloom, that motivated Jacob to keep on living, and now that it had been released, the largest artery of his spirit had been depleted, the reason for his being, exhausted, and to watch him fade, without a glimmer of resistance, unsettled Bloom. He didn't know what to do. He had grown accustomed to the oblivion in which his father had dwelled for so long, an oblivion that now seemed to him mild compared with this one. He couldn't fathom the rate of such an unnatural decline. In less than six months, his father appeared to have aged ten years. His life no longer nurtured the gardens in which he dwelled; rather, it leeched into them, drained into the soil holding firm the roots of the hedgerows. He grew so feeble, Bloom was afraid to leave him alone at night. He feared he would set himself on fire with his pipe's burning cherry of tobacco, that he would, perhaps, take a drunken tumble down the stairs, or worse, stumble upon the courage to exact his own destruction.

When the elder Rosenbloom entered the gallery in the late afternoons, the younger Rosenbloom climbed to the heights of Salazar's chamber, where, sitting across from Cyclops and before the dim reflection of the projection table, he kept a watchful eye. He watched and labored on the illustrations of
Death, Forlorn
, hoping he could prove his devotion through the dedication of his work, his exacting lines. He thought, surely this would show him he was still loved and needed by Bloom, that his presence continued to fortify him. Perhaps then he would return to him, if not in full measure, as some small fraction of a man. And so the younger Rosenbloom worked through the nights with Salazar's journal by his side, learning from his hand how to draw strong, flowing lines and embed detail into his compositions in such a way his father would feel as awestruck as Bloom felt the first time he set his eyes upon Salazar's pages.

During the day, he now refused to leave his father's side. He took Roya by the hand and led her to the gardens, where amid the hammering of the construction, he sat with her in case he could no longer fight his fatigue. And it was here, when Bloom's face had begun to resemble what it would look like when he became a man, Roya reached out and pressed into his hand a note that read, in her childlike script,
I will watch over him
. She then reached out and took the younger Rosenbloom by the neck and placed his head on her thighs, at which point she opened a second note and placed it in front of his eyes. It read:
Now sleep
. Roya's palm pressed itself against Bloom's ear, and the world grew silent, and Bloom slept. And every day afterward he slept with his nose buried in the pungent scent of Roya's lap.

*   *   *

On the sixth morning of Yamim Noraim, just as the autumnal winds began to blow, the team of craftsmen put the finishing touches on their work. By the afternoon, when the gales began to howl their fiercest, the last of them departed, leaving behind an arrangement of unremarkable architecture. Out of the materials that had traveled such a great distance to the top of Mount Terminus, they formed a cul de sac at the plateau's far end. At its center, some form of French chateau with an odd configuration of asymmetrical towers and spires. On either side of this huddled a colorful collection of smaller-scale construction, an incongruent assortment of Samoan huts, Tudor cottages, a Rhine castle, odd little shacks with domes and minarets, all built up with plaster, lath, and paper. Where the long stretch of property abutted the mountainside, they had built two sizable warehouses whose roofs were lined with skylights. Across the road from these structures were a dozen wooden stages with latticed roofs. It all amounted to a small settlement. Seventeen buildings in all. Impressive to the eye only insofar as it was something of a monstrosity, a pastiche conceived in a mind holding little regard for balance or symmetry.

When the last of the tools had sounded, and the last of the workmen had departed, the elder Rosenbloom left his garden and joined Bloom at the overlook. For the first time since the start of the construction, Jacob looked down onto the land he had provided his estranged son, and upon seeing what had been built, he said with a brave smile, I hope you will try to find your place there. Bloom could see his father's eyes dampen in this instance, and he thought for a moment he was going to reach out and pull him into his chest the way he did when Bloom was small, but just as a tear had welled with enough volume to fall onto his cheek, his father turned and walked away. He meandered through the avocado grove, brushing his long fingers over a burr forming on the trunk of a male tree whose flowers had wilted, and every few paces thereafter, he bent down under the limbs of a female and lifted from the ground her blackened, withered fruit. And when his thin arms bulged with misshapen avocados, he returned to his garden's labyrinth, where he would stare into the leafy eyes of his topiary for the last time.