The Glass House (16 page)

Seth stared at it. It was little more than a jumble of skittering lines and whorls.

“Is this another joke?”

If it is,
WJ thought,
someone's going to pay big-time for the gag.

WJ typed in the entry code he'd learned from the indigent synaesthete who'd first appeared at his Wellness Dream Clinic in San Francisco almost six months ago.

The screen went blank, then a runner appeared from left to right:
Welcome, fellow traveller.
WJ looked at Seth. “Are you a fellow traveller, Seth?”

“With whom?”

“What?”

“With whom would I be travelling?”

“This gentleman,” WJ said, then selected a video that came up quickly. It was of the famous British synaesthete Daniel Tammet.

Seth watched intently. Every word this Mr. Tammet said was true. This guy evidently had learned Icelandic in less than a week and had recited pi out to more than 20,000 digits. Both immensely impressive feats, but as far as Seth was concerned, they had nothing to do with him.

“How's about this guy?” WJ said and selected another video. This one showed a middle-aged black man who was taken to the top of the Eiffel Tower and for ten minutes scanned the Paris cityscape. He was then locked in a circular room, where within twenty-four hours he painted in astounding detail the entirety of what he had seen in those ten minutes—right down to getting the colour of the window shades and the hanging laundry correct.

“Impressive, no?” WJ asked.

“That's hard to deny.”

“What, that it's impressive?”

“Yeah, that,” Seth snapped. “So what has this got to do with me?”

“Never been to this website, Seth?”

“No. Never.”

“So you're not a synaesthete?”

“What's a synaesthete?”

WJ ignored the boy's question and pointed at his laptop, “Never seen this website? You're sure?”

“I told you I've never—”

“I need you to see one more video.”

“Swell. Is there an NFB short before it?”

“NFB?”

“National Film Board of Canada. Socially relevant cartoons and boring birds are their specialities. The sex life of the tribreasted warbler was their big hit.”

“Sounds fascinating.”

“Yeah, your tax dollars at work.”

“Your tax dollars—not mine.”

“Right.”

“Wanna see one last video on your site?”

“My—”

“Wanna see it or not?”

“Sure.”

Using a remote he drew from his pocket, WJ turned off the lights in the room. They blinked off from ceiling to floor in a conical cascade.

Then he hit a single key on the laptop.

At first there was nothing—just darkness. Then the darkness gave way to a silhouette of a slender man dressed in what looked like a monk's robe with its hood up. He was walking away from the camera as he entered a very large, completely circular room.

The figure moved slowly—the word “glided” came to Seth—to the very centre of the large space.
The exact centre of the space,
Seth thought.

The figure, still with his back to the camera, stopped and seemed to find an utter stillness. Was he breathing?

Then he reached up and pulled back his cowl.

He shook his head, and his hair fell free, well down his back.

He rearranged his feet, then tilted his head back and sang a single note up into the dome.

He waited.

The echo of the note came down in loops, one note after another, each exactly the same.

He waited until all the sound had disappeared, then he tilted his head back again and sang the same note up to the dome.

Once again the note came down in loops.

But this time, before the sounds dissipated, he sang a second note—a third above the first—then quickly followed with a third note a fifth above the first note.

Then he opened his arms wide and full chords of music looped down to him.

Again he waited for all the sound to dissipate.

Once he had complete silence, his back tensed. He turned his head towards the dome and sang eight distinct notes at two-second intervals. And the chords came down. The first a diminished seventh, the second a minor fifth.

The young man spread his arms, accepting the loops of music as one accepts a gentle rain in the desert, a moth's breath.

He bent his knees and leapt into the air—then, somehow, buoyed by the echoing chords, he stayed some six feet above the ground.

The chords began to mesh, forming more and more complex chords and, as they did . . .

Seth pointed at the screen.

The young monk had inverted in the air—his head towards the floor—and spread his arms wide. He began to spin slowly. And as he did, the young monk's face finally came into view, and on that face were etched moments of glory. That face with glory so deeply
imprinted on it clearly belonged to Seth Roberts—cancer patient, master dreamer.

WJ snapped the computer off.

Seth felt a surge of longing deep in himself, as if his heart were being pulled forcibly from his chest, as if his true soul's mate had been wrenched from his arms.

WJ positioned the cello between his knees and quickly rosined the bow. “You like music.”

“Says who?” Seth felt himself somehow falling.

“Me. Says me.” He locked eyes with the boy.

“I'm sick.”

“Yes. Yes, you are. But you're gifted, too. You're my point of access.”

“To what?”

WJ didn't answer the question. Instead, he hit a button on his remote and all four walls and the ceiling began to glow.

Seth stared at them. They were massive LED screens. Seth slid off the gurney and stood. “What the—”

“Look down.”

Seth did. The floor was a screen too, and as he looked an image formed under his feet. He was standing on ancient paving stones. “Now look up,” the grey-haired man commanded. Seth did. The walls were somehow curved into a tall cylinder, and the ceiling was a perfect dome.

“Here's your first note,” WJ said, playing a B flat. “Now sing that.”

And to Seth's surprise a perfect B flat flew from his mouth up to the ceiling and then its echo descended. But before it got to him, WJ played another note and commanded, “Sing that.”

“You don't know what you're doing!”

“Sing that!”

And Seth did.

Then a third.

The echo of the notes surrounded him in a pure chord, and he felt a huge smile cross his face. He stopped resisting, raised his arms, and lifted off the ground.

Instantly he was in his favourite dream, gliding out of the clearing, moving towards the glass house. But even as he saw the figure in the doorway—the figure whose face he'd never been close enough to see—open the door for him, he felt himself sucked from one dream reality to another.

Sliding—sliding in his dream.

Without a whoosh or any sense of motion he found himself in a large, solemn interior space.

Seth stared at the black painted canvases on the walls—fourteen huge paintings—and although he'd never been there before, he knew where he was: one of the accesses to the forest—a portal—the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas.

Then he saw him, standing alone in a corner, crying. And he knew it was Mark Rothko—the artist who created the panels that occupied every wall. He had committed suicide shortly after the completion of his masterpiece.

A hand landed on his shoulder, and without looking he knew it was his father's.

“I thought this was a portal,” Decker said.

“Someone's forcing things. It's not ready. Not everything's in place.”

“What do you—”

“You said you thought this was a portal.”

“Yes.”

“
Was
is the operative word.”

“Now what is it?”

“A cul-de-sac, a dead end—just ask Mr. Rothko.”

“But why are the portals—”

“Because they've forced us to the end. Almost everyone who can get to the clearing has already gotten there or is through the
forest and approaching it, so there's no reason left for the portals—no need for a way to get to the woods.”

A cry of anguish turned their eyes to the artist.

The man raised his tearstained face and shrieked at them, “Is it really art? I mean, is it really art that I do?” then he broke into a cackle. From beneath a bench he withdrew an old record album, slid it out of its cover and placed it on a turntable that had not existed five seconds before.

Bob Dylan's “Highway 61 Revisited” came up and filled the space.

Decker recalled a documentary on Dylan where one of the talking heads had said something like, “It's as if God blew in his ass and out of his mouth came poetry.”
No,
he thought,
out of his mouth came truth.
He looked at his son.

“You aren't—”

“Surprised? No, Father, I'm a much better dream traveller than you.”

“I just heard the lions and—”

“And here you are.”

“You speak as if—”

“I'm the father and you are the son?”

“Yes.”

“We've met in dreams before, Father, but you don't remember them. I do. I remember all my dreams—I always have. I've seen the glass house, and you don't even realize that you're in the clearing. Do you remember the last time we met in dreams?”

“Why are you being kind to me? You haven't been kind to me—”

“It's a dream, Father. When did we last meet in dreams?”

“The temple at Epidaurus?”

“Yes, the dream temple. I was covered in a bloody skin—on a raised platform.”

“I remember.”

“Another cul-de-sac. No doubt it's closed now, too. Listen to the music. Remind you of anything, Father? Come on, you're Bible-read. And of course you love early Dylan. And where exactly is Solitaire?”

“At the junction of Highways Six and One.”

“Right. Come on, put two and two together. Find the fucking semblant order here.”

The words flew from Decker's mouth: “Come on, Abe, now kill me a son.”

“Right, Father—and the next important line?”

“Where do you want this killing done?”

“And the last?”

“Down on Highway Sixty-One.”

An angry cry drew their eyes. Rothko was screaming at the huge triptych on the west wall. Then his screams were drowned out by the roar of fire.

“What . . .”

“I'm surprised it took them so long,” Seth said.

“Took who?”

“The believers.”

“But why would—”

“Because if this is a path, then only one of two things can be true. Either there are more paths than they subscribe to, or their path is wrong.”

The benches in the centre of the Rothko Chapel burst into flame as all fourteen paintings exploded into rectangles of fire.

Rothko slumped to the floor and held his head in his hands.

“Why aren't—”

“—we able to feel the heat, Father?”

“Yes, that.”

“Because we are not really here.”

“Is this really happening, Seth?”

“A foolish question.”

“Why?”

“Because this is a dream; besides, “really” is a child's word. And only a child uses it, because an adult knows that real is a totally relative idea. What's real to you need not be real to me—in fact, it's unlikely that it's real to me. Like that scalpel in your hand.”

Decker looked down and was shocked to see a surgical blade in his palm.

Seth held up his hands. Where his baby fingers should have been there were only bloody stumps.

“Tell me what to do,” Decker demanded.

“Help me.”

“Anything. I want to help you. I need to help you.”

“You will. Before we get to the end, I have a battle to fight. And I'll need your help.”

“Tell me how.”

“Are you waking dreaming yet?”

“Like this?”

“Yes, like this.”

“Sometimes.”

“No good. Can you waking dream on command?”

“No.”

“Then figure out how, dammit.”

“Okay.”

“When I need you I'll find you there, in a waking dream. Now pick up the scalpel, Father.”

Decker hadn't realized that he'd dropped it. He reached down and picked up the thing. He held it out to Seth, who took Decker's right hand and put it against his own heart, then with his right hand grabbed his father's left hand, his knife hand, and plunged the blade hilt-deep into his own chest.

Blood covered Decker's right hand.

“Seth.”

“Don't cry, Father, we are not really even here.”

Decker stumbled back and looked past Seth. Two giraffes were outlined against the rising sun, and a herd of oryx were moving slowly to the east.

Linwood came up behind him and put a huge hand on his shoulder.

“Did you see—”

“What you saw? No. But I felt the shift.”

“The sliding, you mean,” Decker said, suddenly calm.

“Sliding? Yes, why not call it sliding. It's worlds trying to align themselves. The one I see and the one you just came from. And the place of meeting—the junction—is always complicated.”

LINWOOD WAS NOT THE ONLY
one who felt the sliding of worlds.

In the Nebraska cornfield in which he had slept, Martin Armistaad felt the movement and knew his time to act was short. He took a long piss, painting a seven-foot-high cornstalk with his urine. Then, after a grateful sigh, he began to work on a dangling piece of barbed wire fencing. Back and forth, back and forth until the heat came and the wire broke free in his hand. He headed towards the farmhouse where his pi-generated calculation told him Viola Tripping had to be.