Mount Terminus (38 page)

When the Mount Terminus subdivision opened, fighter pilots recently returned from the war flew planes in formation across the basin and performed feats of aerial acrobatics. Simon, in the company of councilmen, the governor, and members of the water authority, stood before a fountain at the edge of the bluff, and there Bloom's brother proclaimed this the beginning of a new era, at which point water sprang forth from the fountain's spigots and arced high overhead. That evening, while in the same company, Simon lifted a switch on a transformer box, and with it, all the land for as far as all could see illuminated. Street after street, incandescent light shone atop poles, out windows, onto billboards advertising soap and beauty products and Mount Terminus pictures. Rockets shrieked from the earth and exploded into sparkling bouquets over clay tiles topping the roofs, reflected from the boulevard's office building windows, onto the eyes of pilgrims who had driven in to take in the spectacle. There seemed to be a ceaseless supply of incendiaries. The sky burst open over the development into the early hours of the next morning; over the stages and warehouses of the new studio the pyrotechnics continued to brighten the sky until the sun broke the day. When the light show had ceased, Bloom drove with Simon to the new lot, and there, before he opened it to the employees and the public, Simon walked Bloom through streets and town squares, past far-flung places Bloom would likely never visit, and he was amazed by what he saw, and he was amazed at what his brother had accomplished. It was all too big for words. It was as if Simon truly were some modern pharaoh or emperor, some ancient warlord philosopher king. He had built here a small city within the city, and with the size and scope of his endeavor a testament to his power and vision, he easily attracted talent from the East, new directors, actors, writers, photographers, technicians, so many, in fact, Simon said he would need to appoint an army of stage managers to commandeer the new personnel. No longer would he be seen on his porch conducting the action of the studio. No longer, Bloom presumed, would he be seen at all. It was one thing to know the enormity of a man's ambition, another altogether to witness that ambition realized. Simon's achievement radiated out over the wires, and as news of opportunity at the studio, on the land here and in the valley, spread in the weeks that followed, more and more pilgrims arrived. Cars streamed in from downtown, from the desert, from remote places in the mountains, the outer reaches of the valleys. People en masse massed in the streets. Everywhere. Simply to see. To be part of history. To behold Simon's achievement. Even the malcontents from Pacheta Lake were present, but perhaps because the festivities were so popular and lively, they didn't dare disrupt them. They did, however, make their attendance known. Dozens of them formed a quiet protest on the periphery of the fountain, at the gates of the studio, and with the grimmest of faces, they silently held up signs of protest—
Ignore Us At Your Peril
;
We Will Be Heard
;
Just When You Least Expect It, You'll Know Who We Are
—and were bullied away by the police into paddy wagons. When the energy of all was finally spent and the stretch of land had quieted, moving trucks rolled in, and the men and women who had purchased their new homes from Simon's real estate company settled, and soon Bloom saw take life the map his brother had kept in his mother's shrine. The entire basin, it appeared to Bloom, grew more and more green and colorful by the day, and it continued to phosphoresce at night, a shade of violet, or was it lavender, and the stars, he could have sworn, had begun to dim. On nights that held a chill in the air, a scrim of smoke blanketed the pale blue light, and if the current of wind swept in from the ocean, it could lift the sweet smell of burning wood as high as Mount Terminus's peak. They were there. Always there. Their cars roaming the streets. Their trams crating them back and forth to and from the heart of the city. An occasional siren crying a sorrowful wail.

*   *   *

As much as Bloom admired his brother's achievement, he took comfort knowing a boundary was drawn around his ambition at the base of Mount Terminus. And while he felt a dull ache when the members of the colony departed the plateau for homes on the grid, he mostly felt relief to see them go, including Simon, who had built a sizable home on a fine piece of property that elevated him just high enough to appreciate the entire stretch of land he had developed. The plateau from hereon would remain largely unused. Except on the rare occasion—when the stages and studios of Mount Terminus Productions were overbooked—it was Bloom's to do with as he pleased. It afforded him the time and silence to continue working at an unhurried pace on
The Death of Paradise
. It provided him the right set of circumstances to meticulously re-create under the warehouse skylights the rooms of the villa as he imagined they had been when Fernando and Miranda, Manuel and Adora occupied them. Every now and again, he called on the aid of Hershel Verbinsky and Hannah Edelstein. He mailed them designs for furniture and art, odds and ends, and, on occasion, asked for a helping hand. Usually, however, he relied on Roya to keep him company, sometimes Gus, who helped with heavy lifting, and every now and again, Gottlieb, when his mood and schedule allowed it. Simon had offered the plateau to Bloom and his mentor, to make it their own personal domain, but Gottlieb was fonder of people than Bloom had realized. He couldn't properly be himself if he wasn't being a nuisance. To feel relevant, he told Bloom, he needed to be in the company of people who properly loathed him. If he wasn't agitating his colleagues, he didn't consider himself fully alive. Bloom, who possessed his own idiosyncratic methods, albeit antithetical to Gottlieb's, understood. He often wished he were equipped to contend with Simon and Gottlieb's boisterous world, but if his time on Santa Ynez had taught him anything, he knew he was better disposed to living his life apart, as his father had done, as his mother had done. Upon his returns from Santa Ynez, he often envisioned raising the walls of the estate higher and higher, so high his view from the top of the tower would become obstructed. He dreamed at times of encircling the gardens and the grove behind such a wall, and cutting himself off completely, forever, with little more than a slot through which he could receive the most essential things. He would have been perfectly fulfilled living such a life with Roya, Meralda, and Gus. And when these figments passed, he thought, perhaps after he had completed
The Death of Paradise
, he would make it so. Cut himself off. For good.

And why not?… What, after all, did he have to offer anyone? Like Death, like Jacob, like the earliest inhabitants of Mount Terminus, his fate, it seemed, was sealed. God had sealed him into the Book of Life with the mark of misery and sorrow. What good was it to fight against it any longer?

*   *   *

Bloom spent some months trying to work out the details of the Mount Terminus massacre, and for months he felt his attempts a failure. He wanted more than anything else to portray Don Fernando as the monster he was, but he worried that if he provided him the camera's point of view, he could very easily turn him into a conquering hero. He attempted, therefore, to frame the atrocity from Manuel's innocent and observant point of view, as his perspective seemed more compatible with the truth Bloom wanted to show. But knowing what he knew of Manuel Salazar now, of his craven self-interest, of his cowardly disregard for the woman he claimed to love, he didn't wish for the audience to mistake his sensitivity as an artist as a form of romantic nobility. He began to recall the conversations he had with Dr. Straight on the subject of nationalism and tribalism, of defining the enemy as something other than human, and it eventually occurred to Bloom, this scene's success—if he was to get to its essential truth—was dependent on a shifting perspective. If his intent was to charge Fernando as a monster, Manuel as an unwitting accomplice, he must humanize the people whose lives they and the church destroyed, and so he went back in time to the images he drew for Jacob in their early days on Mount Terminus, the ones in which he included his mother as a participant in the mountain's idyllic past, and he decided to make the conquered, not the conquerors, the centerpiece of this movement. As soon as Fernando disgraced himself in Spain, was ordered into exile by the king, put aboard the ship bound for the New World, he would cut away to the spring on Mount Terminus, and dwell there with the children hanging from the limbs of the oak trees, with the men spearfishing in the sea, with the women tending to the fires and preparing for the feasts and the celebrations. Here he would allow the light to shine, here he would make these people as real as Eduardo and Estella were real, and he would show his audience who the true barbarians were, and what darkness they carried in their hearts.

When this idea took hold, Bloom began drawing throughout the days and late into the nights. He relived his earliest days on Mount Terminus and re-created the world he had imagined as a child, the images he had captured in his waking dreams. And on one such night when he attempted to retrieve from his memory an image of his mother, to see her living within the long-lost Arcadia, he paused for a moment and looked out his studio window, into the courtyard, where he saw a dark figure returning his gaze. It stood still for a moment and then walked off in the direction of the cottages. He thought perhaps it was Roya, but Roya, he recalled, had long since turned in for the night. Perhaps he saw nothing at all? He shut off the light so he could better see into the dim light of the courtyard, and now he observed the same dark figure walk under the toupee of bougainvillea atop the pergola. Bloom hurried out the studio door, down the steps into the courtyard, and he followed the figure into the grove, where he glimpsed a slim wisp of a woman's silhouette enter the rose garden. He called out a hello, but there was no sign of her. He continued on to the garden's center, through the passages cutting across the concentric circles, and when he reached the glowing limbs of the enraptured couple sleeping the Sleep of Death, there, sitting on the bench set opposite Jacob's grave, in the glow of moonlight reflecting off the statuary marble, was Isabella, the sight of whom caused Bloom's body to behave in an involuntary manner, one not conducive to sustaining consciousness. His extremities started to tingle, as did the very follicles attaching his hair to his scalp. The scent of the air sweetened, and then the moon's silvery glow grayed and eventually filled with an inky darkness.

*   *   *

When Bloom started to come to, he felt his head resting in the warmth of a lap and a hand stroking his cheek. Again his thoughts turned to Roya, but when he opened his eyes, he found what was unmistakably Isabella's face in the darkness, and he thought of his mother searching the windows for an image of Leah, and he thought of the images he saw of her being chased by the phantasm of her dead sister. He reached for the hand running down his cheek and felt its form, its fingers, its bones, and he said to himself, I've gone mad.

No, Joseph, you haven't gone mad.

But you're dead.

No, I'm here, said Isabella, here with you.

She sounded weak, like an imprint of a life, as if something inside the very core of her had been torn apart. She reached for Bloom's hand and raised it to her mouth, and she blew her breath onto it. She then pulled his palm to her breast so Bloom could feel the faint beat of her heart.

See?

It's not possible, thought Bloom. He lifted himself up and turned to her.

But your letter …

What letter?

The one you carried with you. The one sealed with the drawings I sent before you departed.

But that letter was lost.

No, said Bloom. No, it wasn't.

No?

No. For almost two years I've been mourning your death.

Two years?

Yes, said Bloom. Two awful years.

It never occurred to me that letter could have found its way to you. If I had thought it even remotely possible …

Her voice dropped off, and Bloom could hear what a struggle it was for Isabella to contend with such a strong emotion. After a long moment of silence, Isabella collected herself, and said, Joseph …

Yes?

Will you please do something for me?

What's that?

Pretend with me, for just a little while, that I never left. Please, can we act as we once did? With the same familiarity? With the same tenderness?

Bloom could again hear in the hollowness of Isabella's voice the echo of something horrible, and he knew whatever had happened to her was far graver than the misery he had suffered when he thought she was lost to him. He was compelled to share with her how bereft he had been, to tell her what it was like for him after he read what was contained in her package. He wanted to tell her how changed he was by the news it carried, how changed he was by his visits to Santa Ynez. For a moment he wondered how he could possibly pretend to be the same man Isabella had loved. He was no longer that person. He had been drained of hope. Grieved. Mourned. Fallen to despair. He had come to adore another woman, a woman who helped reconstitute and renew his spirit. Her companionship had fundamentally changed him. He wanted to say it all, but as they stood up and started walking in the direction of the courtyard, he could see in the glow of light emanating from the house how thin and frail Isabella had become, and when he walked her inside and sat her down in the parlor, he saw to what extent her once vibrant eyes had lost their vitality. A thick fog had settled within them. And when he began to comprehend what hopeless state she was in, he said, My dear Isabella, there's no reason to pretend. I'm still the same man. The very same. And then he asked if she would let him call a doctor for her.

She gently took his hand and said, Please, Joseph. As if I never left.

All right, Bloom agreed. As if you'd never left. At which point it occurred to him to take her to the library. He guided her up the stairs by the arm, and when they entered the room she and Dr. Straight inhabited for the months they were on the estate, he said, There, see, as if you were here only yesterday.