Robert Wilson - Gypsies

“But you stayed behind,” Palestrina pressed.

“I couldn’t go! Or I didn’t want to go. Or I wasn’t strong enough to go…”

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember them begging me. We were all older then. By then I knew that Julia and William loved each other, that they loved me but in a different way. A lesser way. So we battered down the sorcels and we were going to go where no one could find us, worlds and worlds away from this place. But I couldn’t or wouldn’t and finally I told them to go while there was still time, just go and leave me… and they did…”

“They left you?”

“Yes.”

“You resented that?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Why don’t you remember?”

“Because the proctors took me. They took me to the surgeons.” He regarded Palestrina with his head cocked, an expression that was at once sly and pathetic. He said, “They operated on me.”

Cardinal Palestrina experienced a twinge of abhorrence. “Operated—?”

Walker lifted his battered gray hat.

The scar was prominent, all these years later. It ran in a ragged circle from the tip of Walker’s left ear past the orbit of his eye socket and up into the hairline. Walker traced it with his finger. “They opened up my skull,” he said. “They took things out.”

“Things,” Palestrina whispered.

“Love and hate. Caring and not caring.”

“And left—?”

“Obedience. Loyalty. They call it loyalty.”

“My God… and you don’t despise them for it?”

Shockingly, Walker smiled. “I don’t think I can.”

No, Cardinal Palestrina thought. No, this is too much: too much cruelty, too much obscenity. It recalled a kind of torture the Tribunals had not practiced for centuries.

They had cauterized a part of this man’s soul, Palestrina thought… and how much could be murdered of conscience or outrage before a man was, essentially, dead?

So perhaps he was talking to a dead man.

The thought was chilling and unwelcome.

“You followed them,” Palestrina said. “That’s what you were trained for.”

“Followed them for years.” Again that distant look, Walker’s old eyes gone diffuse. “It’s hard work, you know. But I can smell them out. They leave trails.”

“Julia and William? You found them?”

“Eventually.”

“Brought them back?”

“Killed them.”

Cardinal Palestrina blinked.

Walker said, “It was unavoidable.”

His face was bland, affectless, smiling. Palestrina thought, He is dead. “But then it’s over, surely? Your work is finished… the project is finished?”

“There were children,” Walker said.

“I see… and they have the power?”

“They have it strongly. More strongly than they know.”

“You’ve hunted them?”

“I’ve been close to them. Often! But it’s not as easy as all that, bringing them back. These arms won’t hold them. A cage won’t hold them. That’s the paradox! It’s a lifework. Spells and geases are the only weapons we have. And they work less well far along across the worlds. But we’re very close now.” He bent toward Cardinal Palestrina; his breath was sour. “They’ve learned things in this building since I was young.”

“I’m sure they have,” Palestrina said faintly.

“And there’s one other,” Walker said. “Child of a child. Hybrid, but the genotype is true. He’s what we worked for all these years. We’ll bring him back. I’ll bring him back. And he can do what you want, you know. He’s powerful enough. A few adjustments—” Walker tapped the pale line of his scar. “He’ll do what you tell him. Lead armies against the Holy Land if that’s what you want. Call up forces across the plenum. Armies that would terrify a god, weapons that would devastate a city. It’s all out there.” Walker showed his teeth again. “Would that suit you? Is that what you’re after?”

And Cardinal Palestrina thought, It might save us.

Or damn us.

He moistened his lips. A cramp seized his belly; it was all he could do to keep from crying out. He drew a breath and said, “You can do that—you can bring him here?”

“Oh yes.” Walker put his hands in his pockets, reclined happily against the chair back. “This time,” he said, “we have help.”

They pulled in late Wednesday afternoon at a motel called the Stark Motor Inn somewhere west of Barstow.

Stark it was indeed, Karen thought. There was no shade but the meager shadow cast by a juniper rooted in the gravel courtyard; the tiny swimming pool out back stood pure and empty as a turquoise chip in the brown vastness of the desert. The room smelled of false lilac and air conditioning.

She reminded herself that they were back home now. Not home in the very specific sense—this desert was surely as exotic a place as she had ever been—but in a world where the verities were familiar: John F. Kennedy dead all those years ago, handguns for sale in the highway malls, no gentle bohemian ocean towns for people like her sister. The real world.

Home—the other kind of home—was still a long way off.

Michael unpacked his bathing suit and went out through the searing afternoon light to the pool. “Dibs on the shower,” Laura said. Laura had driven all the way from L.A. and looked weary. From Los Angeles, Karen thought, and across a canyon of time. They had passed between worlds out on the empty highway, amid the scrub brush and the dust devils. Miracles and murders and hotels in the desert.

She read Time magazine while Laura showered. The news was as dour as it had ever been. AIDS was on the increase; there was trouble again in the Philippines. Laura emerged finally from the tiled cavern of the bathroom, toweling her hair. She had thrown on an old flower-print shift; the cloth adhered to the damp angles of her body and Karen was momentarily jealous of her sister’s youth, preserved somehow while her own had slipped mysteriously away. Laura had never married. Laura was a single woman. While I, Karen thought, am that very different thing: a single mother.

Laura said, “They don’t know we’re coming.” Mama and Daddy, she meant. “No,” Karen agreed.

“We should call them.” “We?”

Laura admitted, “I don’t want to be the one.” “I guess you haven’t talked to them all that much.”

“I guess I haven’t talked to them for years. I’m the wayward daughter, right? Bad seed. Anyway,” she said, “they’ll take it better from you.”

But Karen had never liked telephones. She disliked the sounds they made, the click and hum of fragmentary dialogues, foreign voices holding foreign conversations. Long distance was the worst. There was something so lonely about a long-distance call: the extra numbers, like mileage, tokens of separation. She punched out the area code tentatively. Michael was still swimming, out there in the blistering light.

In truth, Karen had not been very good about phoning home either. She called every couple of months, sometimes less. And on holidays. But mostly she tried to call weekday afternoons, when the rates were higher but when Daddy was likely to be at work or out drinking. It was a long time since she’d spoken directly to her father. Years, she wondered, like Laura? Yes, maybe: maybe that long.

She imagined the phone ringing at the house in Polger Valley. The family had moved there the year after Karen went off to college, but she remembered it clearly. The phone was in the parlor. Fat textured yellow sofa, telephone on the walnut end table. Sunlight, maybe, sifting in through dust motes and the glacial ticking of clocks. Karen understood intuitively that none of this would have changed, that the Polger Valley house had become a kind of fortress for her parents, that they would live there until they died.