Mount Terminus (33 page)

*   *   *

Neither Bloom nor Isabella could have anticipated that this funereal night in which they lay together quietly contemplating the fates of Miranda, Adora, and Manuel Salazar would be their last for the foreseeable future. The following day, Isabella stood in the doorway of Bloom's studio some hours before they were to meet for lunch to tell him Dr. Straight had received a telegram informing him that his wife, Julia, had fallen gravely ill. Bloom followed her out to her cottage and helped gather her things. When the packing was finished, they paused long enough for Bloom to say, You will come back to me, won't you?

She leaned into Bloom and, without saying a word, kissed him.

Please, said Bloom, tell me you'll come back.

Yes, she said, I will.

As soon as you're able.

Yes, said Isabella. As soon as I'm able.

And that was all. In an hour's time of hearing the news, Bloom stood at the top of the drive with Gottlieb beside him, and they watched them motor away.

Do you feel the despair? Gottlieb asked as the sedan dipped down onto the mountain road.

Yes, said Bloom.

Good! Now go use it! The small man reached up and turned Bloom's shoulders, pulled down his chin so they faced each other. I will not tolerate idleness. Not for a moment. There is much too much to do. If you must be forlorn, be forlorn with Death. He awaits you. Gottlieb now turned Bloom in the direction of the door, walked him through to the courtyard, and pointed him in the direction of the studio.

*   *   *

Bloom returned to his work that day, but as much as Gottlieb willed him not to allow his emotions to interfere with his work, but to make it better, Bloom felt such a profound absence of spirit, he wanted nothing more than to take to his bed. He somehow managed to continue his preparations for the production of
Death, Forlorn
, stopping every now and again to draw for Isabella a small sketch. He posted in the mail two, sometimes three drawings a day, each a small detail of the villa. If accumulated and arranged at the point of delivery, they would have been a taxonomy of his small world's margins. For some time, he drew objects that hung on walls and in doorways: Oriental cloths, strings of Turkish beads, a Japanese lantern suspended from a silk cord. At other times, he drew bouquets of chrysanthemums, pink, orange, and white. Cushions of Japanese silk. Chinese vases. Elijah in his cage. The view of the courtyard from the windows of his studio.

He received letters from Isabella not quite as frequently as he sent them, but frequently enough that he didn't feel neglected or forgotten. He learned, through the month of desert gales following their departure, that Dr. Straight had been made bereft by his wife's illness, and when she died some weeks after the autumnal gales had ceased, he grew inconsolable. Since his time on Mount Terminus, Isabella wrote, the congenial man who stood with such granite stature had withdrawn from his colleagues and responsibilities and had taken to drinking himself to sleep at night. Isabella wanted nothing more than to comfort him in some way, but found the only way to care for him was to let him be. Bloom considered abandoning his work and leaving Mount Terminus to be with Isabella and Dr. Straight, to help see them through their difficult time. He did know something about loss and its aftermath, after all. But this notion occurred to him too late. Before he could gather the courage to act on his noble idea, he received a letter from Isabella, telling him she and Dr. Straight would soon be departing on a long journey. They had been invited by the Institut de France to conduct their invertiscope experiments in field hospitals at and around the front beyond Paris. The psychologist and philosopher Pierre Janet, who was well known for his studies on hysteria and his experiments in brainwave entrainment, believed the invertiscope could prove a beneficial tool in treating soldiers suffering the effects of shell shock and could, perhaps, be used as an effective therapy to rehabilitate the wounded. I can't tell you, wrote Isabella, Dr. Straight's transformation since he received the invitation. He has rediscovered his reason for being. Not only would they be able to put their experiments to work in the field, but also they could very well serve a beneficial purpose. And, what's more, they would be in close proximity to the battlefield, where they planned to document the war on film. They would collect footage they could one day apply to Dr. Straight's aversion trials.

Upon reading this, Bloom wrote a response in which he pleaded with her not to put herself in peril. Should something happen to you, look to Dr. Straight to see what you will make of me.

I know you understand, Isabella replied. I know you wouldn't want to dissuade me, or the doctor, from doing our work.

Aren't you afraid? he wrote.

Of course I'm afraid, she replied.

I'm afraid for you.

I want to embrace my fear.

When will you return?

I don't know.

But when we return, she promised, I will return to you.

I'm diminished.

Be proud of me. And wish me all the best. Tell me to be brave.

In his last exchange with Isabella before she departed, he wrote just that. I am proud of you. I wish you all the best and more. Be brave. And he then expressed his love for her not with words, but in a miniature drawing of Cupid and Psyche. Take this with you, he wrote on the back, and think of me always.

She allowed him the final word.

*   *   *

Bloom would receive no letters or telegrams after this. He would hear nothing about Isabella or Dr. Straight from Gottlieb. Nothing of her whereabouts or what she was doing. She would, nevertheless, inhabit him completely, not unlike the way a series of images inhabited his thoughts when he began to contemplate a scenario for a picture. The images, when they manifested themselves, grew inside him, larger and larger, and spread out widely and clearly until they were complete and ever present in his mind. From here he could survey the entire picture at one glance.
Wie gleich alles zusammen
, Mozart said of this moment when he was composing symphonies. Right away, all together—
Wie gleich alles zusammen.
In this period of Bloom's manhood, this was precisely how his moods were composed when Isabella's image arrived in his mind. He saw her in all her permutations, inside his deepest thoughts, felt her in the innermost regions of his body.
Wie gleich alles zusammen.
To heighten this experience, he often went to the library, where Isabella and the doctor did their work. In their hasty departure, they had left everything exactly as it was the moment they received the news about Dr. Straight's wife. They left a crate beside a table on top of which was a light cabinet, beside this, Walgensten's thaumaturgic lantern, still assembled, its candleholder submerged in rivulets of cooled wax. And hung from the bookshelves before the lantern was a white sheet on which they revived the phantasmagorias they discovered in the wooden boxes. Bloom told Meralda and Roya to leave all these objects just so. They were not to be moved until Isabella returned. Until then, he said to them, I want to be able to look upon everything as it is, to look upon the white sheet, to see Isabella as she was.

*   *   *

In the months that followed the last of Isabella's correspondence, Bloom found in his deepest solitude the ache of longing. He no longer took comfort in his most solitary moments. Instead he was agitated by his solitude, and for not having been more forceful with her, he was ripe with regret. Had he only fought for her harder, he wondered. Had he traveled to the university to remove her from Dr. Straight's influence, he thought, perhaps, then, she would be with him now. As he completed his work on
Death, Forlorn
and began to review the work he had done, he better understood the husband's obsession and despair. He now knew what motivated him to walk into the apothecary's shop to drink down the bottle of poison, to take on Death's challenges, to sacrifice his life for the life of his lover. He better understood why, when he was a child, his father made him swear that he should protect his love when he found it. He knew now that the failed promises of love weighed down the human heart more so than any of love's hardships. He better understood the wounds that festered within Samuel Freed. He could empathize with his irrational need to torment the one he believed responsible for the loss of all his future affections. He better understood the lengths to which Manuel went to watch Miranda, the impulse that drove his father to his gardens every day. He knew now why Simon, it seemed, never pursued love, why he was suspicious of it, avoided it altogether. For the first time, Bloom knew the hollow nature of loneliness. Before Isabella, he felt whole in his solitude. After Isabella, he knew that feeling to be an illusion.

As he had done for
Mephisto's Affinity
, Bloom drew the storyboard for
Death, Forlorn.
He redrew the images he had spent almost a year composing for his father, made additions, included even more detail. And when he finished his panels, which amounted to more than two hundred, he proceeded to chart out for Gottlieb every aspect of the production. He mapped out frame by frame, scene by scene, every camera angle, point of view shift, approach and retreat. He inserted cutaways and diagrammed lighting arrangements, what lamps belonged where on the battens, in what order they were to be turned on and off. He choreographed each actor's movement to and from their marks, sketched costume patterns for the seamstresses, made notes for makeup changes that coincided with the lighting changes. He went so far as to design an outdoor set constructed from concrete. It would be fitted with copper tubes through which they could run kerosene to stage a controlled fire for the climax, when the husband entered Death's embrace. When it came time to build the sets, Bloom oversaw the work until he was satisfied with every detail. He checked and rechecked the lights. Set out the actors' marks. Laid the rails himself for the tracking shots. They would film the live action first, and then move on to the filming of the miniatures, for which he devised a special track all its own, one that circled the entire fortress wall, so it would appear as if it were being observed by the young couple from their carriage. And for the moment when the wall dematerialized before the husband, he would achieve this through stop-motion animation, by methodically removing one brick after the next. Death would then walk through the opening of a small portion of an identical fragment of wall he would build on the lot. He would then animate the closing of the wall by reversing the process. One by one, he'd replace the bricks in the order they were removed. And on he would move to filming Death's cathedral in miniature, which Bloom built in such a way he could dismantle it into several pieces. Fit together, he could film its exterior. He would then dismantle it, fill it with lit candles, reassemble it, and hoist it up to the ceiling of his studio, where he would set the camera beneath it and there capture Death's captive souls.

Some days before filming was to begin, he reviewed his notes with Gottlieb, who said to Bloom, You are most impressive, Rosenbloom.

Am I?

Yes, said Gottlieb. Be a man and direct this picture yourself.

No, said Bloom.

But it's all here. The entire vision is already directed. You only need to step behind the camera and describe to the actors what they must do.

But it's there, said Bloom, I'll fail. I'm no good with the actors. I haven't the slightest idea how to talk to them.

There is your problem. You think of them as some form of human being. They're not people. They're dogs. Treat them like dogs and they obey.

I've never owned a dog.

Ach
, said Gottlieb, you're impossible. All right, then. We do it together as we did before. Only this time as equals. You be the eyes, the technician. We follow your plans to the image. And I'll make the dogs chase their tails.

To this, Bloom agreed. And together they met on the lot and brought to life
Death, Forlorn
. And when Bloom had fit the last of its many pieces together in the editing room and ran it through the projector, he saw what lived in his mind the day his father handed him the story and asked him to draw it for him. And on this day, he missed Jacob Rosenbloom as much as he had in the days following his death.

*   *   *

For some reason, Bloom began to find in the mail letters from war widows who identified with the husband in the story. All expressed a similar sentiment. If they could do for their men what he did for his wife, they wrote, they would. They expressed the solace they had taken from the story's theme of inescapable destinies, and many of them identified with the moment the husband discovered his love was gone, taken from him without warning. They recalled days of limbo, in which they waited for news, for letters, and they described how they shared the dread expressed on the actor's face the moment he realized his love had been taken from him. Letter after letter Bloom received was a compendium of suffering and heartache. He wanted to set them aside, but found he couldn't stop pouring through them, and the more he did so, the more precipitously his mood began to decline.

You must stop this at once, said Gottlieb. You have a successful picture on your hands and what do you do with it? You wallow. It's time to push on. Gus said the same. For the time being, however, Bloom wouldn't push on. He would continue to wallow. The world around him, as it had done on so many occasions in his past, began to fill with darkness. One night after he made certain Meralda was asleep in her room, he went to the stable and retrieved a pick and shovel. He walked into the rose garden, at whose entrance Roya was standing. She accompanied him into the connecting circles, and when he reached Cupid and Psyche, he began swinging the pick into the hard earth. He dug and he dug late into the night, and when he had dug his way down to where the crown of his head poked out of the ground, he climbed out of the hole and walked into the villa through the service entrance. He took from the kitchen a ball of twine, then down he went into the cellar and up he went into Manuel's chamber. He followed the silver thread of Ariadne and moved past Theseus to the eye of the Minotaur, and there he collected Adora's remains. He wrapped her in her blankets, bound them together, then bound her to him.