Phoenix Café (40 page)

Misha glanced uneasily into his camera eye.

“I’m trying to say I’m sorry. I know there are no excuses. I’m just sorry.”

“Don’t be,” said Catherine.
“Ça ne m’a rien coûté.
It’s not as if we could have been real lovers. We’re too much alike.” And she laughed.

After a moment’s puzzlement, he laughed too.

“It’s nearly midnight, Miss Alien. Shall we go outside? Excuse me.”

She saw the self-regarding perfection of his walk again. The ghost of an elegantly tattered duster coat swirled. He spoke to a young woman in a high-necked overtunic and loose trousers, the usual dress of Traditionalist women aid-workers, who stood by processing desk. Her face was undisfigured; her great, dark, shining eyes still lovely. Catherine marveled at this astonishing resistance: then Misha unguardedly put his hand on the woman’s shoulder. His touch passed through the image.

He returned. They climbed an outside stairway, picking their way between huddled bodies. At the turn there was an open landing. Misha folded his arms on the wall of ancient poured stone, and gazed out at the city.

“On a night like this, it seems to go on forever.”

“Was that Helen?”

He glanced at her sharply. “Yes. She wants to hold on right to the end, to be with me.” He looked down at the cropland, the scented bean fields of one summer day, in another world and time, and shrugged, admitting the fantasy. “She’s always with me.” He let her see the fx generator on his wrist. “Sometimes she’s just a hologram. Sometimes, I swear, there’s a fragment of my Helen. Sometimes, she looks out of those eyes—”

“Ah. Like that? Let her go, Misha. It’s over, set her free.”

“Why should I?” He looked away from her. “What would
you
know about it?”

Catherine lifted her shoulders, a sad smile that didn’t reach her eyes. The blank spaces of the heart. “Something and nothing.”

“By the way, I’m off the testo. And I’m staying off.” He half-turned, following the glittering horizon of spires and towers. There was so much light tonight, in the city that had been in Aleutian darkness for so long. “They say, about people like me:
he doesn’t care for anyone but himself.
Not true. You can’t love yourself, if you don’t love anyone else. I loathed ‘Misha.’ Now I don’t. And I love Helen. I didn’t, before. I didn’t know she was a person. I thought she was a goddess, and out of arrogance, out of vanity, I thought I owned her and didn’t care about her pain, as long as she was there. Sorry isn’t enough. I want to thank you. I don’t know how, but you helped me.”

Catherine thought, it was true that they were alike. Far more alike than Clavel and Johnny Guglioli, but nowhere near so close as Misha and Helen. The night he’d shown her his work, his branch of cold flame, how strongly she’d felt his sense that it didn’t belong to him. That nothing in the world belonged to Misha: and therefore he had unlimited license to “get his own back” any way he could.

She’d blamed herself, blamed Aleutia for ruining this young man. But it was Helen who owned the world, in Misha’s eyes. Parent, lover, mentor, servant—in Old Earth Aleutia’s romantic ideal wasn’t a futile fantasy. It was only too possible: and it appalled her. Which was very funny, after three lifetimes. She thought of Maitri, who fortunately would never be her lover. Though in all the lives, she’d probably never love anyone more.

“How little divides us!” she exclaimed.

Misha nodded absently. She decided she would not try to share the joke. Though she seemed to remember he’d once said much the same thing about immortality, always a romantic ideal for humans. In real life, it was appalling.

“What will you do now?” he asked. “I mean, afterwards.”

“Live, somewhere or other. Maitri’s cook has offered me a home, if the Giratoire seems too haunted. I have some credit. I think I’ll work, sell my stuff. Why not? Mâtho bought my diaries.”

“Well, in that case…” He delved into his jeans pocket and produced a small packet. “I’ve been wondering if you’d want these. I would have sent them to the Giratoire house, but I didn’t know you were still in Paris. You know my father committed suicide?”

“Shame.”

“Yeah. I was hoping he’d spend his declining years in a proper old fashioned prison, getting child-abuser therapy from his friendly cell mates. He wanted you to have the keys to the house at L’Airial. Everything’s as it was, and of course the staff will be there. He liked you. He said he was very glad to have met you. Take them, anyway. You may want to go back there someday.”

Suddenly he checked his inner eye again, and started. “That’s it!” he exclaimed. “They’ve gone!” Far out in the dark, out of sight behind the moon, which was near the full in their sky, but in reality invisible, above the city’s atmosphere, the shipworld had winked out of existence.

Gone.

Uproar broke out. Sirens blared, bells rang. A torchlight parade began, careening wildly onto the cropland. Crowds rushed about below them, trampling the fields, shouting, singing, letting off firearms.

“My God,” breathed Misha. “Gone!”

They watched the riot of sound and light and mad rejoicing, in silence.

“This is the real world,” said Misha. “Here, where people hack each other to pieces and cry in each other’s arms. This will go on. The Buonarotti device will become part of it all. No one will think about what it means. Here, where we live and die, people don’t care how the engine works. Or what happens when the illusion of a single reality is broken. They’ll just get in that car and drive. And that’s the way it will always be.”

He looked at Catherine with a new and startling expression. It was compassion. “You’re going to be so lonely.”

She shook her head. “Oh no.
For I am surrounded by so great a crowd of witnesses,
as the Reverend Paul of Tarsus puts it. I’m never alone, no matter where I am. I’m an Aleutian, an embodied consciousness, embedded in the matrix: a person just like you.”

Every self in the myriad: every separate flame.

“I’d better get back to Helen. Goodbye, Catherine. Try to forgive me.”

She thought how much she detested being pitied, apologized to, and made to feel like a cripple. And she laughed again.

“Nothing to forgive. As my old friend Karl once said to me, in another lifetime: fair exchange is no robbery. Goodbye, Mish.”

But he was gone, down the stairs, through the bodies. Catherine stayed. After a while she tired of the spectacle, and went to see if the police had any spare washing-powder.

Envoi: Un Bel Di Vedremo

One day. It was mid-July, according to the calendar, and a late, hot, ocean afternoon. Catherine was coming up from the beach with her bodyboard under her arm. She climbed the wooden steps, sun and salt prickling on her bare back. She was alone with the Forest’s cloud of witnesses, the invisible virtual users. She put her hand on the rail at the gate, and saw the Campfire bracelet. It sat easily on her tanned wrist, but snug enough that a band of white developed under it every summer: this impossible messenger, this mocking reminder that she
did not know.
The tiny brilliants in the incised flames glittered. Her gaze was held; her grip on the bar of soft, salt-powdered wood became so vital and intense that she remembered the paper flowers; she remembered Tracy Island. She was walking out of the police station again: punch-drunk, wavering; and there: something moving on the floor, caught in the corner of her eye…

The girl with the phoenix in her hands.

She would never know when it had begun. When time and space have been once annihilated, all the rules are changed. The young people of the Renaissance had set out to catch themselves an alien. Not because they needed Catherine’s help. Not at all! Because they
didn’t
need her, and they wanted her to know it. She remembered her night in the Blue Forest. Misha had been cruel, and that was a crime, but when she thought of his heartless, triumphant young face as he
shafted
her, the alien in disguise, who was on another planet and didn’t even know it, she could not help but sympathize. They had taken their revenge: but so joyously, so playfully; and with such little cost to Catherine, in the end.

She saw Misha and Helen Connelly as she had seen them last, in the field hospital. Helen had died, while Misha lived, and presumably was still alive somewhere; yet she still felt it was Misha who had been destroyed, Helen who had escaped from prison. Who had survived the battle of the sexes. Traditional young ladies must vanish, along with many lovely, tainted things, and she had to hope the war was over for good: she was an Aleutian.
(We don’t want to bore you,
reminded Lalith’s voice sternly:
But there was a holocaust.)
Let it go, let it pass. She had been a bit player in a drama that she’d only partly understood. Everything must be forgiven.

but when?

Ahead of her, on the landward side of the dunes, the Forest began, the world where she lived at L’Airial in perfect serenity, with the park staff and her work; with the Virtual Master or some descendant of his (she wasn’t sure: the staff simply always kept a hedgehog mascot; always known by the same name). The winters were still getting longer and colder, over all. The permanent snow did not retreat. But the Atlantic Forest would last out Catherine’s time, not much altered. Sometimes she roamed the house, searching in closets of forgotten junk for relics of the schoolroom that she’d never found again. Looking into the empty rooms and wondering which had been Helen’s boudoir. She used Mr. Connelly’s study often; it was her favorite winter lair. She would sit curled up in his brocaded armchair, listening to his Puccini records by the chrysanthemum fire.

Occasionally she caught up with the news of the post-Buonarotti world, where the humans were learning to get in that car and drive. She was not tempted to return. She believed that Misha had told her the truth about the Tracy Island event. The young people had played that fine, scary, exciting game with her, in the timeless instant of passing through the Buonarotti gate, and finally delivered her safely to LAX…. But she would never know. The human scientists at the Buonarotti project worried endlessly about the paradoxes of breaking the mind barrier, the awful suspicion that reality
was,
in some sense, destroyed, shattered into fragments and remade with every Buonarotti voyage. What happens if something gets left out; what if the reconstruction fails?

The sum of being shifts like a kaleidoscope, always changing. And yet from moment to moment, what happens, happens. What is, is. Somehow it will always seem to fit together: just as the unstable, multifarious cloud of signals that makes a self-aware mind seems a coherent self.

But if the mask slips…. She stared at the bracelet.
Is this a new world that came into being that night, when we defeated the doomsday conspiracy? Did I ever leave the game? What is real?

i don’t exist, I’m nothing, there is no catherine, no place, no time.

The glitter of the stones released her.

The sky was a blue void in which stately white mountains of cloud hung suspended; the navy blue rollers drove in from the ocsean and fell in spume onto the sands. She noticed how her wrist had grown more muscular but thinner, over the years. One could see bone as well as blood through the fragile skin now; jutting bone and unexpected hollows. How much time did she have left? Not enough, of course. She felt such a passion of love for this blue air, for this green world. To which Johnny still might return; might have returned even now from the mazes of rebirth. Any day he might come to visit her, or send a message.
I’m back, I remember everything, I love you….
Some part of Catherine would always believe the sweet impossibility was possible, as long as she lived. And yet, she thought, she would be glad enough to leave when the time came. All debts paid (for a while); the long strain over. She passed through the gate, shouldering her board, and shut it behind her. The jeep was waiting, half asleep, in the silence of the forest margin.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 A short bibliography

How the Leopard Changed Its Spots,
Brian Goodwin, Weidenfield and Nicolson, London, UK 1994;
Hiding in the Light,
Dick Hebdige, Routledge, London, UK 1994;
Leonardo da Vinci,
Martin Kemp, J.M. Dent and Sons, London; 1981;
The House of Souls,
Arthur Machen, Grant Richards, London 1906;
Greenmantle,
John Buchan, Pan Books 1950;
The Life of St Catherine of Siena,
Blessed Raymond of Capua, tr George Lamb, Harvill Press, London UK 1960;
The Story of A Soul,
St Thérèse of Lisieux, Wheathampstead, Anthony Clarke 199
0; Histoire De Ma Vie,
George Sand, Academy Press 1977;
Flaubert-Sand: the correspondence,
tr Francis Steegmuller and Barbara Bray, based on the edition of Alphonse Jacobs, Harvill, 1993;
L’Education Sentimentale,
Gustave Flaubert, Penguin 1946;
Les Blanches Annees,
Jacqueline Bruller; Stock, 1980;
Thérèse Desqueyroux,
Francois Mauriac, Bernard Grasset; Paris 1927. The John Singer Sargent portrait is of Graham Robertson; it’s in the Tate Britain Gallery, London. “Yo Soy La Desintegración,” Frida Kahlo, a sketch in a diary entry: from
The Diary of Frida Kahlo,
intro. Carlos Fuentes, Bloomsbury, London UK 1995. The virtual laboratory (Vlab) was inspired by the work of Hungarian biologist Aristid Lindenmayer, 1968, reported by Tim Thwaites, in
New Scientist,
IPC magazines, May 1995. Special acknowledgment: Jeremy Millar (c/o The Photographers Gallery, London) for the influence of his exhibition “The Institute of Cultural Anxiety” (ICA December 1994 to 12 February 1995). Special acknowledgment also to Vincent Shine (c/o laure genillard gallery, London), for his version of (plant) life exactly recreated in artifice. Agathe Uwilingiyimana was the Prime Minister of Rwanda, July 1993–April 7, 1994.

Quotations

An explanation for group suicide, from
Jude the Obscure,
Thomas Hardy; Catherine on her need to believe in God, from
Jacques le Fataliste,
Denis Diderot. Maitri’s appreciation of Misha’s style, from
Two Gentlemen of Verona,
Wm Shakespeare Act I scene.3; Misha’s defiance song, “The Wearing of the Green,” traditional.
A branch of cold flame (in the heart of a man)
…. Patti Smith, “Land/Land of a Thousand Dances”; the Car Park hymn
(don’t be afraid to live),
music Jo Akepsimas, lyric Jean Serval. Alicia Khan’s question of ownership, Alexander Pope, from an epigram engraved on the collar of a dog given to Frederick, Prince of Wales; Agathe’s complaint about the difficulty of doing good, from
Paul et Virginie,
Bernadin de Saint Pierre. Misha applying the eyedrops on Catherine’s first entry to the games-room, from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Wm Shakespeare, Act II scene 1; Dr. Bright’s comment on proliferating weapons production, “I am become death,” a quote from the Bhagavad Gita attributed to J. Robert Oppenheimer; on seeing the first atomic device detonated. Agathe on human smiles, from
Hamlet,
Wm Shakespeare, Act I scene 5; Triumph chant in the Blue Forest, “When the Saints Go Marching In,” traditional as far as I know. Maitri on the spirit of adventure, from
Hassan,
James Elroy Flecker; Helen’s description of her art from
La Boheme,
Puccini (librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica); Maitri’s household’s farewell to Earth, “Spanish Ladies,” traditional. Catherine’s ever present company, Hebrews chapter XII verse 1.