Джонатан Келлерман - The Golem of Paris

Then again, he could ask the same of himself.

Maybe the little hothead had pissed off the beetle brass.

Maybe it was the August M. Vollmer of the chitin-wearing set.

Jacob lowered his chin and tried to make eye contact. “Lost?”

The beetle had simmered down and was glowering at him, drops of venom welling at its joints. Jet-black abdomen, head and thorax deep orange. Not a particularly sexy creature, the elytra pebbly and overlong, as if it was wearing poorly hemmed pants.

He was more interested in what it didn’t look like than what it did.

He was more interested in what it might become.

It didn’t look like her. And it didn’t change. It was an ordinary bug, one of roughly a hundred hundred jillion. Compared to beetles, the sum total of every human being who had ever lived, from Adam to Einstein, was a rounding error.

He reached over and snapped off the lamp.

At four P.M., he saved his work to a flash drive. The weekend lay depressingly open, a problem solved by grabbing a handful of files from the box to take home.

He shouldered his backpack and sandwiched the cup and index card between his palms, causing the beetle to resume its frenzy.

“Chill out,” he said. “You’re gonna hurt yourself.”

He’d arrived that morning before sunrise, and he stepped from the hangar into a disorienting midwinter twilight that made it seem as if no time had passed.

He hesitated before setting the beetle free, mildly concerned that it might turn on him in anger. That was what a human would do.

Surveying the tapestry of black, the glittering pinpricks, he recalled the taste of Mai’s breath in his mouth as she spoke her good-bye.

Forever.

Promise; request; command.

But he could only swallow infinity in human doses, day by day, keeping his lonely vigil, stalking bugs with a plastic cup and an index card because he had no other way to be close to her.

He pitched the insect into the air. It shot off, all too happy to get away from him.

He had to smile. Beetles were survivors. They were high-strung. They spooked easily. Like all the most successful creatures — and they were successful — they lived strictly in the present, vengeance being memory’s deadliest side effect.

Adapt or die.

She floats on the night wind, watching him from afar.

He is searching the sky. Hunting for her.

In the kaleidoscope of her eyes, he appears as a thousand illuminated versions of himself, his color the dreary beige of loneliness. She loves each fragment equally, with fervor and futility, drawing comfort from knowing it is her that his heart breaks for.

Her heart would break for him. If she had one.

Forever she thinks, and she pretends that he can hear her.

A thousand versions of him toss as many beetles into the air; seconds later, the captive streaks past her angrily.

Thank you, friend.

The blister beetle doesn’t pause but continues on toward the desert, uninterested in her appreciation. It did its job, it went where she wanted it to go, but not out of any special kindness toward her. She’s a charmer, all right.

Below, a thousand car doors open, a thousand tailpipes chuff. He drives away.

Some nights she follows him home. From a distance, of course. They can’t be seen together, and she doesn’t want to alarm him. But she worries. She can’t help but worry. He has a nasty habit of drifting out of his lane, especially after a hard day, especially drunk. More than once she’s had to nudge him back into line.

Other nights she makes a visit to a fig tree. She sits in its branches. She descends, to rest on the shoulder of an old friend.

Today is Friday. He’ll be headed there himself, as he does every week.

So that leaves her at liberty, and — as she does every week — she circles down toward the building, entering through a gap in the roof panels, touching down and transforming into her truest self, standing nude at his desk, her skin pebbled with cold as she riffles through the open box, looking for the file she put there. Not wanting to be obvious about it, she placed it fourth from the top.

That was months ago.

True, he would have gotten around to reading it eventually.

Patience has never been her strong suit.

Tonight, at last, the file is gone.

Thank you, friend.

She ought to feel satisfied, but instead she’s restless and reluctant to leave. The air still smells of him. She lingers, touching his chair, the desk, the surfaces where he has left his oils. On the computer screen, a golden shield bounces around a benign blue field: TO PROTECT AND TO SERVE.

An idea worth aspiring to.

He’s left the space heater on. Another bad habit. She shuts it off and raises her arms to the false heaven.

Jacob sat facing the madwoman.

Like every other visit. Sitting. Staring. The two of them beneath a twisted fig, its branches fruitless, the adjacent concrete patio stained purple and brown by the decayed autumn crop.

The madwoman stared at the ground; at the branches; at her own twitchy hands.

In Jacob’s direction, but never at him.

Her hair was dry steel veined with glossy black, a foot of waves tied into a staid bun. Tonight they’d dressed her in a navy-blue cable-knit sweater, tan flannel pajama pants, the fuzzy brown house slippers Jacob brought for her last birthday. An abrasive army surplus blanket draped her lap.

“Are you warm enough, Ima?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. She wasn’t going to answer. He wrapped the blanket over her shoulders like a prayer shawl. She didn’t appear to notice one way or the other, pursing her lips, still full and red but chapped from long hours in the sun. Like Jacob’s, her complexion was olive toned. Supposedly her own mother’s side was originally Sephardic, Spanish-Jewish aristocracy dating back to the expulsion.

A tradition, a story, a rumor. You couldn’t prove it, you couldn’t disprove it.

She asked for you.

She hasn’t spoken in ten years.

A decade of lies.

Following Sam’s confession, Jacob began coming to see Bina every afternoon, desperate to claw back lost time, armed with his own bright ideas for drawing her out. Talk therapy. Touch therapy. Flowers, chocolates, trinkets; a blitzkrieg of love. Her only child, he would bring to the surface the maternal instinct seething like a century-old fire at the bottom of a coal mine.

Bina sat, stared, her unoccupied hands kneading the air.

Her doctors couldn’t agree on the cause of the fidgeting. She’d been medicated off and on for Parkinson’s. Well-intentioned nurses would give her whatnot to fuss with — a toilet paper tube, a stress ball with a pharmaceutical company logo.

There we go. Now she won’t be so bored.

She had been a gifted and prolific ceramicist, once. Jacob asked the staff if they’d ever tried giving her clay.

They hadn’t thought of that.

The following visit, he’d arrived with a package of Plasticine, seven rainbow-hued slabs stuck together. He pulled off a hunk of red, rolled it to warm it up, pressed it into her hands, and waited for the healing to begin.

She froze.

Ima?

Inert as the clay itself.

Maybe she wanted a different color? He tried orange. Same result.

He worked his way through the spectrum. Nothing. She was a waxwork. It unnerved him worse than the twitching. He took the clay and put it back in its pouch.

I’ll leave this in your room in case you want it.

His visits thinned to every other day, then twice a week, once. The staff didn’t judge him. On the contrary: they seemed to approve. At last he’d gotten with the program, accepting the basic worthlessness of his presence. The very model of a dutiful son.