The Cloud

49

I open the door. At his silent urging, I reach into the front seat and snag the Juggler and hand it to him. I stand. I pull the brain images from my back pocket.

“There’s more,” he says.

“Of course. But not here.”

Knifepoint aside, he’s more genial than I remember, stocky, but an ambler, like a guy trundling to get a beer from the fridge.

I walk a step in front of him, hands jammed in pockets, where I feel my keys and the phone they mingle with. Weapons? Hardly.

It’s anger that wonders these things, not hope. The future no longer matters.

I walk up a modest grade, soil and chunky rock beneath my feet, trees becoming denser as we ascend Mount Davidson.

“Where’s Faith?”

“Safe and very comfortable. Comfy.” He’s trying out the vernacular. “She spent the night at the Mandarin. Keep walking.”

The Mandarin. One of San Francisco’s nicest hotels.

I trudge, my feet sinking slightly into the damp soil, winding up the hill into what is becoming a veritable rain forest, surrounded by thickening English and cape ivy and blackberry bushes. It’s the lush green, primitive San Francisco that lies beneath the crisp green money and the organic lettuce. My vision glazes over but in my mind’s eye I can clearly see the whole mystery, not the mystery involving Leviathan, Faith, Alan Parsons, the girl killed by the Volvo, the Juggler-that remains hazy-but my own mystery.

Polly died the night Isaac was born. Isaac died hours later. I plummeted into disbelief and grief. I poured myself into work. I became surrounded by sympathy, even from the cops who once hated my zeal for undoing authority. Every compassionate touch felt like a burn. I can see now the Witch pleading with me to come to terms with my loss, trying everything. That’s why she wanted to share an office with me, so she could monitor me, cajole me, albeit gently and with her witchery. She lit candles, offered temple massages and patiently, without comment, took down the picture of Isaac that I’d emailed myself from my phone and printed out and, inexplicably, tacked to the wall.

Finally, relenting, I agreed to see Wilma, a therapist. Less Witchery, more Freud. I said I was going because I just didn’t feel like myself.

For months, I wouldn’t talk about Polly. Our relationship was so brief that she never really happened, we didn’t happen, Isaac hadn’t really come into this world, just stopped by in transit, so what was the point in talking about it?

But in the last few weeks, right before the subway incident, I started to feel something different. Grief. Raw emotion. I started to see Polly and Isaac not just as another dream deferred but as a connection severed, one I’d spent a lifetime trying to make. I left med school because the practice of medicine was too barren and impersonal. I’d pursued writing, a lifetime of poor-man’s poetry through prose. And I’d found my muses in Polly and Isaac.

Then I got smacked in the head. Concussion. The fresh wounds of realization paved over by blunt-force trauma. My new neurons of grief commingled with nine months of denial, giving rise to a twisted fiction in which I’m separated from Polly, living in her former house, driving her car, but somehow still connected to her and Isaac, whose toy bouncer remains unused on the floor of my living room.

I hear voices-from the present.

I’m standing at the crest. I hear the man with the knife only a step behind me. In front of me, ten steps away, stands Faith. She wears a puffy jacket but still wraps her arms around herself to ward off the chill. Next to her stands a man who looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t quite place him. Then I can.

Looming above them, the monster cross. We’re at its feet, supplicants and sinners.

“Gils Simons,” the man says. He takes two steps forward, extends a hand, as if he might shake.

I look back to Faith. She’s unshackled, evidently not a prisoner. Is she here of her own free will? What is real?

I look out in the distance to the far edge of Mount Davidson. Soft fog, weather’s most passive-aggressive state, blankets what could be a majestic view of downtown and the bay. I close my eyes. I wobble. I picture myself juggling all the lies and half-truths, the ones that I’m being told and the ones I’ve been telling myself. I’ve juggled at the expense of experiencing something real, and static, and true. I cannot juggle anymore. I fall to my knees.

Faith says to the two men: “Would you mind if I handle this?”