Bruce Wagner - I Met Someone

He left them and walked to the vast terrace that overlooked the crashing sea. On the way, he was startled by three figures whom he thought to be guests before realizing they were employees. They smiled at him unobtrusively as they tended to the open-pit fire and busily set the stage with a profusion of scented candles, Persian pillows, and dark cashmere throws. He noticed a southern gate and went through it. Without fanfare, he found himself in a garden of dumbfounding sweep and breadth. He strolled, insensate, through a dusky, virtual meadow of ghostpipes and creeping myrtle, monkeyflowers and bursting heart, coatbuttons, toadflax and old man’s beard.

Another gate led to the beach and he stumbled toward it.

He took off his shoes and walked onto the sand. The sorrowful wisp of a Santa Ana, broken off from the herd, brushed his face consolingly and reminded him of Devi’s greeting.

The refrain of late— who am I, why am I, where am I —played just beneath the wave song, with its choral variation: And what if I die before I know?

He looked toward the soft lights of the house and heard laughter… Tristen, laughing! His wild child, blue-eyed boy! Would wonders never cease? He ambled back to the patio, where servers revolved with platters, delicately setting dishes on driftwood tables round the fire. Others brought carafes of water, juices, and wine. After a few minutes Devi emerged and dismissed them.

Suddenly the three were alone on the deck, gathered by the colored flames:

Storytelling Hour!

“Do you remember where we left off?”

She jumped right in, her method to a tee, which suited him fine. Tristen was already wolfing his food but paying strict attention.

“I was talking about the bells — always the bells! — and the fire that took my mother… I’ve been thinking about all of it . The only thing I haven’t put to mind is my daughter because I knew I was going to tell you about her tonight. It’s an extraordinary gift to have found someone to talk with— organized by my Sir and the Source —for I haven’t spoken of this in so long. My guru says it’s my fate— our fate, yours and mine! — to have found each other, just as it was mine to have found him . We don’t know what ‘the bells’ have in store for us yet, do we, Jerome? Isn’t that exciting? We forget so quickly that it’s already written, and can be no other way. Mind if I call you Jerome? I like it so much better. Well, not so much better, but I do like Jerome. And I’m thrilled that you brought your friend!” Tristen grinned, his mouth half full. “It’s always a good omen to have a witness, particularly since the Sir is dead to the world. (If we’re very quiet, we might hear him snoring.) We’ve had such a long day and he needs his rest.

“Now, I’ve told you Mama died in a fire, and Papa followed just a few months later. His lungs were scarred by the heat and smoke when he carried her out. He held her so close that his skin became hers; I can see them emerging from the conflagration of that house like figures in a great fresco of Rubens — or something in the American style of Thomas Hart Benton… where her skin was no more, his stood in, like a graft. I’ve found that detail ( not a metaphor) to be worthy of any of Poe’s creations.”

Jeremy noticed the boy had stopped eating and was completely rapt. He presumed Tristen’s awed attentions had something to do with his recent role as caregiver to his own father, and the looming mortality of the aggrieved man who had brought him into this unquiet world.

“Before he died, my father made me promise I’d return to school (I’d taken a sabbatical to nurse him) and resume my studies. I was to inherit his practice — the only legacy he had to give. I told him I would and meant it, but after the fire it was impossible. You see, he never cared about money. His finances were in shambles. We’d been living in a motel since the holocaust; he’d forgotten to pay a bill and the insurance on the house had lapsed. The bank foreclosed.

“I told you at the restaurant that after their deaths, the clanging of the bells became too much—‘a fatal tinnitus,’ remember? I returned to Loyola and promptly went mad. I lived for months in a hospital associated with the school but that’s another story. The short version being, I became pregnant there. A boy I knew from campus, prone to violence. He’d been placed on seventy-two-hour hold. They put him in the lockdown ward and he smuggled me in — as I say, another story! I knew at the very moment I lay with him that she had been born. I knew her sex and even what I would call her: Bella! — my beauty, my only, my Bella, my ‘bell’! And in that moment of conception, the world stood still. Everything stopped ringing too… everything but my love for my daughter and this mysterious blue planet and the starry places beyond. I left the hospital immediately.

“I rented a room above a garage belonging to a former teacher of mine who pitied me. She thought I could have my child, come to my senses, and return to my studies. Because, you see, I was ‘filled with promise.’ In that tiny space above the carport, with Bella at my breast, I was so happy, Jerome! Time stopped, and with it, all worry. I took a job as a waitress. The teacher’s mother lived in the main house and was delighted to look after the little one while I worked.

“I won’t talk about what went wrong with Bella’s body, in her fourth year. The details. Please forgive that omission… it’s too painful. Though my Sir has said that one day I shall be able. It won’t hurt at all, he said, the time will come when I’ll be eager to remember those awful, terrible things — though I admit I have trouble imagining such a time, so do forgive my faithlessness! — but my Sir says they won’t be awful anymore, they’ll be as beautiful as the memory, the truth , of her eyes, her hair, her skin — that I’ll wish to remember it all , the closer I come to seeing her again. For that is where we are going, my guru and I: to that place where she resides, that place where my Sir will see those dear to him, whom he once lost as well. The wife and son that he loved, and loves still…

“While she was at Children’s, I took long walks. I was there, of course, for all treatments and procedures, holding her hand, kissing and fussing over her, taking on her pain as best I could, never leaving her at night. They kept a cot for me right beside her. But when she napped (often with the help of medicine) I took walks because I was starting to hear the bells again; walks were the only thing that muffled the noise. You see, if one is not in the proper frame of mind, if one isn’t ready , the sound of the bells can be very unpleasant. For they’re not the sound of bells as you know them… On those meanderings, I’d pass a homeless man, surrounded by heaps of rags and discarded things, who begged for coins from his carpet of cardboard. I wouldn’t go by him all the time — it depended on which route I took. But when I did , he searched my eyes in such a way that eventually I chose to force the encounter. Each time I grew near, I slowed on the approach, until one day I broke through my shyness and spoke to him. I’m telling you, I was in a horrible, shambling state! Yet the moment I was in his presence, something strange occurred… I didn’t realize until half an hour later that the bells had stopped entirely . He cleared an edge of cardboard and asked me to sit on some shag he had requisitioned from a dumpster. I felt no shame. Pedestrians walked by, hardly giving notice. No shame! You see, I’d come home . So I poured my heart to him and told everything . About the fire and the bells — and my Bella. Jerome, never in my life had I been listened to like that! The tenderness! Had his tenderness stood of itself, without my anguish to balance it, I think it would have been too much to bear. I’d have died from such kindness.”