The Night Villa (3 page)

“Excellent work, Miss Hancock, a model for the rest of you.”

Agnes starts to smile, but then her gaze drifts over Elgin’s shoulder and her big blue eyes widen. I assume she’s reacting to one of the other candidates, most of whom have abandoned the conference table en masse to drown their disappointment in sugar and butter, but then I hear something loud explode in the room and Elgin trips over Barry.

My first thought is that one of the urns must have gotten pushed to the floor and that Odette’s going to be furious, but when I swivel in my chair I see that Odette isn’t paying any attention to the coffee urns. All her attention is taken up by the slim, dark-haired boy striding purposefully into the room and toward Elgin Lawrence, his right arm stiffly extended as if he’d come expressly to shake Elgin’s hand. For half a second I think of Ely because the boy looks a little like him—he’s even wearing the same Converse High-Tops Ely always wore—but then I realize Ely hasn’t looked like this boy for years. This isn’t Ely; it’s Agnes’s ex-boyfriend, Dale, and he’s not trying to shake Elgin’s hand, he’s holding a revolver pointed directly at Elgin’s head.

I want to tell this to Odette because I somehow think it will change things. That the information will stop her from stepping in front of Elgin, a step that pulls her into the blast from the next shot as though she had stepped into the red wave that explodes across her chest and then knocks her back into the coffee cart, splattering sticky buns and terrified students in the wake of her shattered body.

I try to stand, but my legs crumple and my chair slides out from under me. On my way down I have time to notice Barry Biddle grabbing Elgin and pulling him out of the way of Dale’s next shot.

Of course, I think as the gun goes off for the third time (why, I wonder, have I been counting?) and I hit the floor, Agnes said that Dale was jealous of her relationship with Professor Lawrence.
That’s
why she was so nervous this morning, not because of the internship interview. I should have paid more attention to what she was trying to tell me.

It’s dark under the table, like the shade underneath the live oaks we walked beneath this morning. Still, I can make out across the table Agnes’s scuffed navy pumps with the little red and white bows that I found so quaint only an hour ago. They strike me now as both heartbreaking and infuriatingly innocent. Hadn’t she realized Dale was capable of going on a homicidal rampage? But then, I think, I’d had no idea how far gone Ely was until he shaved his head and went to live with a cult. I remember how all my friends had wondered how I hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t noticed that he spent more and more time alone locked in a room chanting, that he’d stopped eating anything but raw nuts, and that the pile of books on his side of the bed were no longer math textbooks but tracts on Eastern mystery religions, reincarnation, and numerology.

Ely. I remember the phone calls and it occurs to me with total irrationality and total conviction that he had been somehow calling to warn me: a warning framed in a numerical code.

Another shot explodes above me, splintering through the table and showering me with sawdust. The fourth shot. The phone was ringing four times when I left my office. I’m suddenly sure there will be five shots in all.

On the other side of the table I see the heels of Agnes’s shoes press together as if she thought she was Dorothy and could transport herself back to Kansas, but no, she’s standing up. In the silence that still rings with the echo of Dale’s last shot I hear her surprisingly firm voice quoting something that sounds like scripture.

“Dale, remember what we talked about.
The evil I flee, the better I find.
”

I see the black sneakers walking toward Agnes’s side of the table, making their way around two crumpled bodies—one I recognize from his clothes as Barry Biddle (I can’t recognize him from his face because his face is gone) and the other is Elgin. Only Elgin is not crumpled. He’s huddled, pretending to be dead, no doubt, his right hand splayed out above his head, his left cupped in front of his face, as if hiding from what is happening above him. I see his face contort as a Converse High-Top steps on his hand, but he doesn’t cry out or move. I try to lip-synch a message to him, but he’s looking down. I notice that a light is reflected on his face and realize that he’s got a cell phone in his hand that he’s trying to operate. He must be trying to get help, but I don’t believe that anyone is coming in time to help Agnes.

I can feel the rough fiber of the carpet rubbing against my elbows and it reminds me of the pavement that burned those people pinned on the mall while Charles Whitman took potshots at them. There’s no shame in trying to save your own life, I can imagine my aunt M’Lou saying. But then there was nothing those people could have done.

I prop myself up on my elbows and start to wiggle myself toward Agnes’s shoes. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch Elgin looking at me, his face lit by the light from his cell phone. His lips are forming some silent command to me, but I can’t tell what. It’s too late, I think; on the other side of the table I can see the black High-Tops approaching Agnes’s navy pumps. The white rubber parts of Dale Henry’s sneakers are slippery with blood. The last thing I want to do is touch them, but then I hear Agnes scream “No!” and I lurch for the shoes, reaching for an ankle. As soon as my fingers graze the bloodstained canvas I can feel that he’s already losing his balance. I hear the weight of his body thud hard against the table, but the fifth shot’s already been fired. It goes straight into the table, blasting the wood above my head into pulp, releasing a corona of gold dust that dazzles my dark-accustomed eyes. It’s like the sun exploding inside my chest and the sky falling. And then it’s like the coldness of deep space as I fall back into the dark.

O
nce, when Ely had locked himself in his study to meditate and chant, I pressed my ear to the door to listen to what he was chanting. At first all I heard was a low rhythmic hum and then, when I realized there were words beneath the hum, I couldn’t recognize their language. I thought for a moment that he’d added speaking in tongues to his repertoire of miracles, but as I listened I realized he was chanting three repeated lines of Greek hexameter verse. It took me another hour to transcribe and translate the three lines. I don’t know what I was expecting. A summoning of Satan? A prayer for help? An invocation to the dead? Certainly not these three questions:

Where did I go wrong today?

What did I accomplish?

What obligation did I not perform?

Later I found out that they were a fragment from a Pythagorean text called
The Golden Verses
—reputedly the lost work of Pythagoras, or possibly a third-century-AD forgery. Practitioners of Pythagoreanism were supposed to ask themselves these three questions every night. I never came across a classical reference to using them as a chant. That must have been an innovation of the Tetraktys, the particular Pythagorean cult that Ely had joined.

I hadn’t thought about the questions in years, but when I opened my eyes in St. David’s Hospital I could have sworn that the sweet red-haired nurse standing over me in her surgical green scrubs asked me, “Where did you go wrong today?”

I tried to answer—I was pretty sure the right answer was “By getting out of bed”—but I discovered that my mouth was taped shut. Two vertical lines, like quotation marks, creased the young woman’s brow and, consulting her chart, she tried another question.

“What did you accomplish?”

She smiled at the end of this one as if we were sharing a joke. “Getting myself shot” was one obvious answer, but then the other possibilities—getting Barry Biddle killed and Odette Renfrew shot—pushed up my throat and struggled against the plastic and tape strapped over my mouth until I could feel myself choking.

The nurse reached over my head where a crescent moon gleamed in the pale green light and performed some motion that released a stream of hot molten silver into my veins. I could taste it at the back of my throat. When her face reappeared above me, she looked weary and many years older as she posed the third question.

“What obligation did you not perform?”

Although I couldn’t speak I found I could move my head slightly up and down—a motion that caused me great pain but brought a beatific smile to the nurse’s face. Yes, I imagined her thinking, you see where you failed! If only you had heeded the portents and signs! The code of rings, the message of the tower, the sign of fire in Odette’s skin! Only a blind person could have failed to see what was coming! The nurse turned to summon an audience for my confession. I didn’t mind, I was prepared to come clean, it was a relief really, but when a trio of masked men arrived at my bed I found my courage failed me. What good did it do to confess my sins now? What good did it do Odette and Barry? I tried to convey an expression of regret before I sank back into the embrace of darkness that lay like a cave beneath my rib cage. A place I could see, by the tubes attached there, had been hollowed out in a vain attempt to lighten my burden of guilt.

The next time I woke up my aunt M’Lou was there. The tape was gone from my mouth, but tubes still ran from below my ribs to a pump beneath me that gurgled and rasped like a giant mouth sucking in seawater. I told her that a nurse had been there asking me questions.

“Yeah, honey, that’s what they’re trained to do. They just wanted to see if you knew your name and all. Do you? Remember your name?” She smiled to make a joke of it, but I could see she was dead serious.

“Sophia Anastasia Chase,” I told her, surprised my lips could still fit around the syllables. “Who could forget being saddled with a name like that? Thank God you made the nuns just call me Sophie.”

“Well, I’d had experience dodging ‘Mary Margaret Louise.’” M’Lou stroked my forehead just like she used to brush the hair off my brow when I had a fever. “You were lucky, Sophie. If that bullet hadn’t first gone through the back of Dale Henry’s head and two inches of mahogany table it would have shattered your chest. As it is, it broke two ribs and punctured one lung. But you’re going to be fine. You just have to try a little to get better.”

“Dale Henry turned the gun on himself? So Agnes is okay?”

She nodded. “Agnes is fine, but her daddy swooped her on back to Sweetwater—out of the big bad city. She’s called me every day to see how you were doing.”

I try to ask about the others—Barry and Odette—but the whirlpool beneath my bed is sucking too hard on my chest. M’Lou sees that I’m having to struggle and calls in a nurse. She reaches above my head and I realize what I’d thought was the crescent moon is really an IV bag. She injects something into the tube that runs into my arm and I feel that same rush of silver through my veins and taste the metal at the back of my throat. M’Lou squeezes my hand and locks her eyes on mine, making the same two promises she made to me when I was ten and my mother died and my dour German-Catholic grandparents adopted me. “I’m sticking around,” she says. “We’re going to get through this together.”

I nod, but I still have to ask. I manage just the name. “Odette?”

I see M’Lou’s lips move but I can’t hear her over the roar of the whirlpool. I can only make out the word
questions.

I knew then that the Charybdis beneath my bed was sucking me down into Hades and that the three questions were a test to get past the ferryman. If I could answer them correctly I could go down and bring someone back. I hated knowing I might have to choose between Barry and Odette because I knew that Odette would insist I take Barry even if he was an idiot. But still, having to make a hard choice was better than not having a choice at all. I just had to figure out where I had gone wrong.

So I spent whatever time I was conscious—and some time I suspect I wasn’t—trying to identify the crucial moment that I started down the wrong path. I thought it might have been when I found Agnes chewing her cuticles outside my office door. I should have sat down right next to her on the dirty linoleum floor and asked her what was wrong. To hell with the interview, I imagined myself saying, we’re going to call my lawyer friend Mary Ellen right now and get an order of protection sworn out against this Dale fellow. The details of what would have happened after that remained a little hazy in my head. Each time I thought I had it all figured out a nurse would come in and, mistaking my moans of anguished conscience for pain, give me a shot of morphine.

The whirlpool would open up then, threatening to pull me into its maw. Could I really assign the moment of error to ignoring Agnes’s problems with Dale? Wasn’t there an underlying reason for my callous disregard of her emotional crisis? A root cause? I could feel the whirlpool pulling me back in time. In the perpetual artificial day of my hospital room, I felt myself slipping back to the last, and only, time I’d been hospitalized before. Only then I had been in the maternity ward.

That first time Ely and I had slept together had come as a surprise. Neither of us had birth control. So I’d counted back the days to my last period and decided it was too late in my cycle to get pregnant. I was wrong. By Christmas I knew I was pregnant. When I told Ely he said that some of the greatest discoveries in the history of math and science had been made through error. Why shouldn’t we have a baby conceived in error? That I was in my first year of grad school and he hadn’t even graduated college yet weren’t good enough reasons not to celebrate the random. He wanted to take some time off before going to grad school anyway. So he got a job at the Harry Ransom Center, the university’s rare-book library, and moved into my Hyde Park bungalow. Clare, the psych major, said she’d been thinking of moving to a feminist co-op across town in Clarksville. Before she left she sat me down on the glider on the porch and asked me if I was sure I knew what I was doing. Was it because my grandparents had raised me a Catholic and I thought abortion was a sin? Was it because my mother had me when she was only seventeen and if she hadn’t let her parents talk her out of an abortion I wouldn’t be here? Or was it because I wanted to relive my mother’s story, only
this
time keep the baby and not let some crazy religious fanatics get ahold of it thus rewriting my own childhood crisis of abandonment?

After swearing to myself I’d never tell another soul about my childhood, I asked if she would please make sure she returned M’Lou’s truck when she had finished moving her stuff. Then I went inside and translated Horace until she finished packing and left, reassuring myself that Clare had it all wrong. I wasn’t trying to relive my mother’s story—she’d been seventeen when she got pregnant with me and I was twenty-four. And she’d been sleeping with so many men that she didn’t know who my father was. My grandmother believed he was Hispanic because of my coloring, or maybe, she’d add ominously, a Jew. My mother had had no plan beyond dropping me off with friends while she cocktail waitressed at night, which quickly evolved into dropping me off at my grandparents’ when she wanted to go to a concert or to Santa Fe to sell jewelry. She left me there more and more until I was ten and she drowned tubing on the San Marcos River during a seven-year flood—an act so silly and frivolous it was as if she didn’t even want to be taken seriously in death. I wasn’t anything like her. I had a teaching assistantship, a scholarship, and, most of all, Ely. And my grandmother had been dead for three years, my grandfather for two, so there was no question of dumping our baby with them.

Ely and I settled into the little house as though burrowing down for the kind of northeastern weather Ely was used to instead of the brief cold snap that Austin called winter. I had a desk in an alcove off the front porch and Ely took Clare’s old room for a study. I traded my creaky old futon for a real bed with a box spring. When the baby came, it would sleep with us. We bought books on attachment parenting and breastfeeding at Starwoman, the New Age bookstore just down the block. The campus shuttle let Ely off right by the store and he often stopped there on his way home and bought me something—a crystal to hang in the window or a scented candle. He poked gentle fun at the lesbians who ran the shop and their Wiccan beliefs.

“You know we’re living in a New Age triangle,” he pointed out on one of our evening walks. We’d fallen into such routines quickly, as if we were an old married couple who’d been living together for fifty years. “There’s Starwoman’s on Forty-third Street; that Jungian bookstore, Archetypes, over on Guadalupe; and then this place.”

He was pointing to a house on the corner we were passing. It looked like all the other clapboard bungalows in the neighborhood that had been shipped west on railroad cars during the Depression, only this one was a little better cared for than the student rentals—the paint fresh, the grass neatly trimmed—and instead of a street number painted on the front porch there was a triangle made up of ten dots.

“What is that?”

“A tetraktys,” Ely told me. “It’s a Pythagorean symbol. There’s something strange going on here. I think this place is some kind of church.”

“Maybe the owner’s a math teacher,” I said. “What makes you think it’s a church?”

“Look at all the cars,” he said.

I glanced up and down Avenue H and saw what he meant. The street was lined with cars all the way down to 38th Street, but there was no sound of a party coming from any of the neighboring houses. The double-wide driveway to the Triangle House (as I’d already started to think of it) was packed like a parking lot.

“I’m surprised they can all fit in there,” I said, looking toward the house. Then I realized what Ely meant by strange. The windows of the house were completely dark. Not a crack of light seeped out, nor any sound. The Church of the Tetraktys was packed with silent congregants praying in the dark.

The night was mild, but still I shivered. “How creepy,” I said, turning away from the darkened house.

“I don’t know,” Ely said, lingering behind me. “The lack of light and sound probably make it easier to concentrate. Pythagoras said that his disciples should be silent for five years while they absorbed his teaching.”

Of course we’d discussed Pythagoras before, but I think this was the first time I heard Ely cite a saying of the philosopher as if he were quoting a prophet. Was that the moment when things began to change? Would I have been able to make a difference if I had paid closer attention to Ely, if I had noticed that the books he brought home from Starwoman were no longer on childbirth and natural parenting but instead were about reincarnation and numerology?

But my focus had turned inward that spring, as if the baby needed all my attention just to grow. Outside the world was bursting with color. Our unmown yard was a riot of evening primrose and bluebonnets, wisteria and coral vine crept over the roof and hung like a curtain in front of the glider, turning the porch into a fragrant grotto. On our evening walks the air was scented with mimosa and night-blooming jasmine. We talked less and less on the walks, a silence I thought of as
companionable.
When we came home I didn’t want to disturb that communion, not even with the buzz of electricity. I’d move around the house lighting candles that released their Eastern perfume—sandalwood, pachouli, myrrh—into the southwestern night. I said prayers of thanksgiving to each flame while Ely withdrew into his study. To prep for his finals, I thought. Sometimes I would hear him humming. I thought it was a sign of how intent he was on his work.