Ghosts of Eden (12 page)

Kayla watched Garty storm away, clearly frustrated. Sitting alone at the table, a wave of loneliness washed through her.

FOUR

His uncle looked very pale in the mid-morning light, bald skin stretched thin over his large forehead. He was skinny and he walked stiffly, as if his joints were unaccustomed to prolonged movement. “You slept well,” he said to Garty, more a statement than a question.

“I slept okay,” Garty said, feeling awkward and out of place next to his uncle.

“I must tell you,” Uncle Xander said, “I am not much good with social formalities. I find small talk tiresome, don’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“Good. Then I would like to tell you a bit about myself and why I invited you out here. Walk with me.”

Garty kept his mouth shut, waiting for his uncle to continue.

“I’d like to begin with a story, about my colleague, Dr. Gary Thayer.”

“Fine.”

They made slow circles around the garden. “I met him while working on my doctoral thesis in physics and astrophysics at UC Berkeley. He was an energetic man, prone to sudden fits of pacing about. It used to make me tired, watching him walk from one end of the room to the other, watching him think, sometimes out loud. But, we shared similar studies, and so spent extended periods of time together. We soon became friends. When my roommate at the time—a morose, quiet mathematics student I rarely saw or spoke with—moved out, Thayer moved in within a matter of hours.

“My friend was more theatrical than I. While I studied quietly at my desk or the kitchen table, he’d be lurching between rooms, going outside, jumping about, and mumbling to himself, all the while with a book in his hand, or a notebook and pen to put his swirling thoughts to paper. At parties he’d often produce a deck of cards from the pocket of his tweed jacket, waving it about like a loon, working the crowd. He’d ask anyone, bouncing from one attractive girl to the next, to pick a card, fanning them out, ‘any damn card,’ until eventually one of the girls agreed, with a resounded shake of her head. Looking the girl deeply in the eyes he’d say, ‘Alright, my dear.’ Then, in a lower and more serious voice, ‘If I don’t guess your card, I will do something truly horrifying.’ Turning to the crowd, “That’s right. If I don’t guess… I’m sorry, what was your name?’ He’d flash a jaunty grin; continue. ‘If I don’t guess Christie’s card correctly, I will kill myself. Right here in front of you all. How’s that sound? I’ll blow my fucking brains out!’ And the crowd would roar with appreciation, clapping and laughing—it was all in good fun.

“Then, perhaps proving how crazy he really was, he’d further heighten the drama, pulling a tiny handgun he always kept in the inner pocket of his jacket out and waving it above his head. Some would gasp and leave at this point, but others stayed, their enthusiasm somewhat mellowed, but their curiosity—and, perhaps more importantly, their morbid excitement—piqued. He’d open the chamber of the gun. ‘You see! You see!’ he’d say, turning and weaving. ‘It’s loaded,’ he’d say, and then press it to his temple. A hush would fall over the crowd then. He’d turn back to the girl, her eyes unsure; mouth open. ‘Now,’ he’d say. ‘Do you know your card?’ She’d shake her head yes, the card held unsteadily against her breast. Thayer would close his eyes. He’d cock the hammer back on the gun. ‘Is your card… the Jack of Hearts?’

“Stunned silence through the party crowd. You could hear panting breath and shifting feet, a sour smell hung in the air, ice clinking and melting in glasses wrapped in sweating hands. The girl would blink, then, slowly, lift the card up to her face so she could look at it, just to be sure. Thayer would pretend to be worried, would push the gun harder into the side of his head. The girl would flip the card around for the crowd to see, everyone craning forward to get a good look. The crowd would burst into applause and laughter. It was, indeed, the Jack of Hearts.”

Uncle Xander paused. Garty noticed they’d left the garden and begun to follow a path into the woods. “Okay…” Garty said. “But why are you telling me this?”

Uncle Xander fixed him with eyes dark and mischievous. “Just listen.”

His uncle cleared his throat. They entered the forest, following the path, side by side.

“Of course my friend never guessed incorrectly. He had a gift. He knew about things others did not. When he graduated, a year before I did, he immediately began work at the University. He was awarded several grants and he continued his research with boson particles and quantum field theory. He soon turned his attention, as many were beginning to do at that time, to the search for a unifying theory of the universe, to rectify the division between quantum mechanics and general relativity, and became enmeshed in the philosophical trappings of loop quantum gravity and superstring M-theory.”

Garty shook his head.

“Just listen,” Uncle Xander repeated, a dark crease furrowing his brow. “It doesn’t matter if you understand. What matters is that you understand that he was never really interested in those things, at least not beyond the framework of thinking they provided. For most, research of that kind was the most important thing to come out of the field of physics since Einstein’s discoveries of space and time, or the work of Bohr and Heisenberg in the field of quantum mechanics. Most were caught up in the mathematics of it all, in the configuring of numbers as a means to prove or disprove particular theories. But that was not important for Thayer. For Thayer, it was simply another research project, a means to scientifically explore the limits of our understanding of the physical universe. You see, he knew things, had abilities. I’d noticed some strange things that had happened since I’d come to spend time with him, little things, but things I couldn’t explain, not rationally.”

The path they were following took a turn, the trees crowded around them.

“While I was finishing my doctoral thesis, I could see Thayer becoming bored with his research. When I graduated, I was offered a job with the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Thayer also got a job there. I stayed in Berkeley to make arrangements for my mother—whom I’d moved to California so I could care for her, but when the sickness struck, it moved quickly, and the fever took her in a matter of forty-eight hours—while Thayer found a house in Los Alamos. When I arrived two weeks later, the house was already fully furnished and my friend had claimed the top study for himself, his ‘observatory,’ he called it, and kept it locked, not allowing anyone, even me, too see what he was building up there. It wasn’t until his untimely death, months later, that I first set eyes on Thayer’s Observatory.”

Garty’s foot struck a rock in the path and he stumbled.

“Careful,” Uncle Xander said.

The forest crouched over them. Somewhere something rustled in the trees.

“Thayer’s Observatory is where you work now. At the top of the stairs.”

“Yes.”

Garty nodded.

“But back then, it was Thayer’s exclusively. He spent most of his time up there and I could hear things sometimes, tapping and bubbling. Sometimes strange and acrid smells seemed to permeate the house from whatever he was working on. I knew he’d had laboratory equipment installed before I’d moved in; he was working on something big. It wasn’t long before he quit his job and began to spend all his time in his observatory. Sometimes, I wouldn’t see him for days, sometimes weeks.

“Meanwhile, my own job had quickly become tired routine. Despite my advanced degree and mathematical knowledge, I found my daily life boiled down to nothing more than writing progress reports and dull supervisory work. My actual job was to oversee the disassembling of bombs and other explosive devices that were deemed outdated or old and unusable. It sounds perilous, but it wasn’t. There was no real danger. And I never did any of the actual tinkering myself. I simply marked off each piece as it was removed on the checklist.

“I soon became annoyed with Thayer’s reclusive absence. When I arrived home in the evening, tired and upset from dealing with the imbeciles at work, I needed my friend, however distracted he might be, as a means to vent my frustrations. I began to think of excuses I might use to barge in on him in his observatory, demanding to see his work. But I had too much respect for him to do that, although I was becoming increasingly curious. I spent long hours waiting by the door, and then with my ear pressed against it, attempting to makes sense of what I heard.

“As it happened, I was not to have to wait long. I came home one day to a wretched smell. It hung in the house—something rotten—almost visible. I choked, nearly vomited, as I made my way up the stairs. The door to Thayer’s Observatory was open. Inside, the fog was thick. There was a large table, and beakers and vials of luminous liquids. In one corner, a man coughed and sputtered. I thought it was Thayer, his features obscured in the smoke, until I came closer. ‘Help me move him,’ the stranger said to me. Then I saw another figure, lying on the floor: Thayer, a jagged hole blown out the side of his head. I gaped. ‘Please,’ said the stranger, and I bent to lift my friend. He was surprisingly heavy and already beginning to stiffen; I noticed right away his fingers held his pistol in the skeletal grip of rigor mortis. ‘What happened?’ I pleaded as, together with the stranger, I dragged my friend from the noxious room. But, once outside, balancing on the steps, the stranger ducked back into the room and was gone without answering my question. I fumbled after him, but all I heard was a thumping sound, like a door closing, from the back of the room, and then the mist began to clear. The stranger was gone. The room was empty.”

Uncle Xander fell silent, looking at his pipe.

Garty looked at his uncle, knotting his brow. “But where did the stranger go?”

“Good question.” His uncle brought his pipe to his lips and inhaled deeply, talked through the smoke. “I wasn’t to discover the answer to that secret until much later, when I finally met the stranger properly, when I was inducted into The Council.”

“The Council?”

“Yes, but I’m getting ahead of myself,” Uncle Xander said. “There was a suicide note, and the evidence was clear. Thayer had killed himself, just as he’d always threatened to do with that stupid little pistol of his. He must have been dead for several hours when I found him. He’d burned most of his work, but I recovered a few things, including some personal papers and a few photographs. In his notes he claimed to have discovered the exact shape and make of the tiny extra dimensions of our universe—those we can’t see, the Calabi-Yau manifolds—thus solving the string theory conundrum. But, he also stated in his note, and I quote, ‘the universe is not what it appears to be.’”

Garty waited, expecting more. They were deep in the woods now. The path had been turning and was beginning to circle back toward the house. The sun was high in the sky, but they were mostly shaded through the needles of the trees, giving certain open spots a strange sun-pixelated quality as they passed through them. After a minute or two, Garty spoke.

“What happened after that?”

His uncle stopped walking. They were in a small clearing. His uncle turned to look him in the eyes and Garty was sure he could see a sparkle of mirth there. “Some call me magus.”

“What? Who does? You mean, like a wizard?”

“Yes. I know things now, things others don’t.”

Garty searched those eyes for a lie. His uncle was crazy; he knew that now. He could see it—the old man believed everything he was saying.

“I invited you here because I need your help.”

“What do you mean by magus?”

“What do you think I mean?”

“I think you mean magic.”

“Perhaps.”

Garty scoffed; he couldn’t help it. “Sure. Okay.”

“You’re like most people in this modern world. Your natural compulsion is to disbelieve, to disprove. Your mind is closed. Believe me, I know. I was like you when I was young. I didn’t believe in much of anything. I didn’t believe in other worlds.”

Garty slid another cigarette from his pack, put it to his lips, struck a light to it. “And now you do? You believe in other worlds?”

“Yes,” Uncle Xander said, his eyes rose to watch the blue patch of sky through the trees. “I have lived a great deal in other worlds.”

“You mean movies, right? Books?”

“In reality.”

A small chill ran down Garty’s spine. “What sort…? How?”

Uncle Xander nodded, that thin smile of his returning.

“Like travelling through space? To different planets?”

“You think I’m crazy?”

“Delusional.”

“No.”

Garty stared at his uncle carefully, at that pale face turned up to the sunlight with the faintest of smiles. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s fine. You don’t need to understand. Not yet. But, I want you know you coming here is no accident. I invited you here for a purpose.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Garty was shaking his head.

“Your sister is special.”

“Sister?”

“Kayla.”

“How is she my sister?”

Uncle Xander sighed. “Don’t worry about that now. I need your help. She has…potential. I need your assistance with her training.”

“Assistance? What the fuck are you going on about? What is all this? First, you tell me this crazy story about your friend killing himself and then you ask for my help to trick some little girl I hardly know into your sick game of magic tricks. Am I right? Is that what you’re asking?”