The Crystal Child (25 page)

After a moment’s thought she came back to something he had said in passing. “You said you began experiencing ‘changes.’ What changes?”

“I’m not ready to tell you yet.” His statement was firm, something he had thought through to a conclusion.  “We have time.  When I came here with Peter, I wasn’t sure how long I might have.  But now — how shall I put it?   Things have slowed down, enough for me to feel more secure.”

“Do the changes have to do with your skin?”

The light in the room was muted, the curtains only half-opened to the afternoon sun.  But that was enough for Julia to catch sight of the one change that made her most curious.  When Aaron passed the windows walking through a shaft of light in the shadowed interior, his skin acquired a sheen.  With the light at just the right angle, he took on a silvered look like a fish brought into the sunlight.

“Oh, that,” he answered, passing her question off brusquely.  “It’s sun-screen.  I tend to burn quickly in this climate.  It seems my skin is abnormally sensitive.”

He had finally given her the chance to assert her expertise.  “We’ll put that on the list until you’re ready to trust me with the truth.”

***

Poor Julia! Prison has taken its toll of her.  Hollowed her out.  But underneath I suspect she’s as sharp as ever.  She noticed the skin right away, even in a darkened room.  I had the sense her curiosity was returning, that she enjoyed to feel her mind moving again.  But what does she expect?  I can’t tell.  Does she think of me as her patient, her surrogate child, her lover?  I must be careful.  I don’t dare tell her how I loathe that moment, when I watched her tormenting herself to find pleasure.  When the boy interrupted, I was so relieved to be finished with her.  Relieved that her struggling was done.  There was no point in going on.  If I were able to tear every last shred of ecstasy from her body, it would have been such a poor substitute.  She too is time’s fool.  Free of one prison, she enters another.  The realm of Cronos, the god who devours his children, is a prison within a prison within a prison.  Minutes, hours, days, years.  Walls of stone built to hold the brightness out.

It was the beginning of Julia’s second week at Tlaloc.  Once again that morning she walked sleepily through the morning routine she had improvised.  Her quarters, high up at the rear of the western wing, faced across the Sea of Cortez, welcoming the sun.  It had become her habit to wait until her breakfast arrived — coffee, toast, fruit brought by an overly servile little girl.  Often the girl — her name was Serena, she was the cook’s daughter — stayed to learn a few words of English.  When she was gone, Julia would take her tray to the pool that lay one level down from her patio. There she spent most of the next hour swimming laps, then soaking while she watched the sun climb the eastern sky.

Dropping her robe at the side of the pool, she left her breakfast on a table at the edge of the terrace and stood in the sunlight braiding her hair for a swim.  As far as she could see to the south, the raw and broken ridge of the sierra angled sharply away, the crooked spine of Baja, shaggy with pines.  There was a cool, dry breeze off the desert heights; she let it play over her body.  She realized that these modest encounters with the wind were the first sensual pleasure she had permitted herself since Aaron had made love to her more than a year ago.  After that, without making the decision consciously, she had encased her body in numb propriety, as if she owed the world an act of penance.  It was only when she turned to enter the pool that she saw there was someone there, at the deep end submerged to the neck.  It was a man — Asian, she guessed — calmly watching her movements.  Startled, she thought of fetching her robe.  But there was a faster way to cover her nakedness.  She slipped quickly into the pool, letting the warm water envelop her.  An embarrassed smile was the best she could do as an apology for unintentionally displaying herself.

The man, who was still no more than a head that seemed to float on the surface of the water, kept his eyes on her.  “I’m sorry,” she said.  “Are you visiting here?”  She knew there were other bedrooms in this part of the house, but assumed they were empty.

“I arrived last night.”  Julia remembered that she had been awakened by a noise some time after midnight.  She thought it was a plane flying low over the house.  Had he arrived by air?  As if he read her thoughts, the man answered.  “By helicopter.  From San Diego.”  His face was smooth and pleasant under a thatch of black hair that was long enough to swirl in serpentine circles around his neck in the water.  “Are you enjoying the house?  Quite comfortable, don’t you find?”  He spoke an accented, slightly eccentric English that led her to believe he was Japanese.

“Very much.  I’ve been here only a few weeks.  I still haven’t seen it all.”

“And the design?”

“I find it a little heavy.  A little ominous.”

“Ominous.”  He repeated the word as if he did not understand it. “That is too bad. It is not meant to be ominous.  It is too big, I grant you.  Sylvana wants to live in a palace.  Peter too.  Big man, big house.  Every time the man gets bigger, the house gets bigger.  Sometimes the man makes bad choice, loses money, gets smaller.  Then he wants the house even bigger.”  He smiled and sighed.  “But it is comfortable, yes?”

“Yes, it’s comfortable.  More than I’m used to.  Luxurious, in fact.”

“Ominous.”  He shook his head in strong disapproval.  “But not more ominous than prison?”

Word gets around,
Julia saw.  “No, not more ominous than prison.”

“Well, good.  That is something.”  He turned and pulled himself out of the pool.  He was  short and muscular..  Without bothering to go for his robe, he padded across to Julia’s side of the pool and squatted beside her, offering his hand.  “I am Isobe.”

“Oh, the architect.”  She took his hand.  “I didn’t mean to be critical.”

“No problem. Soon, you will like this house very much, I know.”

“I’m sure I will.”

“Sylvana says you are the miracle doctor.”

“Not really, I …”

“You have the power to heal aging.  Strange.  I have never thought of aging as sickness.”  Before Julia could say a word, he put his finger to his lips.  “This is big secret, I know.  Not to fear.  I tell no one.”  Then he giggled.  “Imagine.  Old men, a hundred years old, still dancing, jumping like boys, making love.”  He burst out in a raucous laugh, spun around and leaped in the air.  “Now,
that
is ominous.  Old man should go into the woods, find a good place to sit, think, and die.”  He plunked down on his bare bottom and assumed a meditational posture, eyes closed, hands folded.  After a moment of silence, he blinked his eyes open and laughed again. “Come,” he ordered as he finally drew on his robe and offered to help Julia out of the water.  “I will show you something a miracle doctor will appreciate.”

“What?” she asked.  He was holding out a hand.  She let him draw her out of the pool.

“I show you heaven and hell,” he said.  He kept hold of her hand as he surveyed her. “Very pretty.  But you have not been eating well.  Skin and bones.”  Then, nodding politely, he let her go for her robe.

Following where Isobe led, she entered the house on the far side of the patio and descended a spiral stone staircase she had not seen before.  Isobe, moving quickly, was far ahead of her skipping down the steps, but she hesitated to speed up.  The stone under her bare feet was rough with pebbles.  As far as she could tell, they were going down through a shaft in the mountain toward some far deeper level of the house.  There was a light-well along side that kept the stairs just barely visible.  At the first landing Isobe stood waiting with the door half open.  The stairs curled away beyond that point, leading down to another, deeper level that was locked off behind a steel mesh gate. Nodding toward the next stretch of stairs, Isobe raised an admonishing finger. “No admittance.”  His voice fell into a tone of mock reverence.  “Is Peter’s holy place.”  He pushed open the door he was holding and waved her through.  In the room beyond, the air around her grew clammier and more acrid with the smell of sulphur.  She had heard the house was built over a hot spring; from time to time she had picked up the rotting-egg odor on the wind.  She had always loathed the smell of sulphur.  If she had known Isobe was taking her to the spring, she might have refused to go.  The sulphur stench was almost too thick for her to bear.  Her eyes began to water.

She was in a large underground chamber filled with swirling steam. Above her was a broad glass ceiling.  Through it she could see the mountain and along its sheer face ranks of shimmering panels that flashed in the sunlight.  These she knew were solar panels. She had caught sight of their radiance when the afternoon sun passed over the southern side of the mountain.  When she asked what the glare was, Aaron told her the house was powered by solar energy.

Enveloped in a warm mist, Isobe was at the far end of the chamber, summoning her to come ahead.  He was standing over a collection of pipes and ducts that emerged from a steaming pool.  In the background were some engines that kept up a steady hum.  “This is heart of the house,” Isobe announced with unmistakable pride.  “You see there?” He pointed down into the pool.  “Heat from hell.  You see there?”  He pointed upward through the glass ceiling at the solar panels.  “Heat from heaven.  A house of heaven and hell. For me this is only importance of Peter’s house.  All self-contained, self-sustaining.  No wires.  Very cheap.”  He broke into laughter.  “Cheap house for millionaire.  See how absurd?”  Wincing as she  approached the pool, Julia squeezed her hand over her nose.  Isobe laughed.  “Terrible stink, but clever.”

Julia looked at the arcane equipment that filled the room. and smiled back.  “I can’t stand the odor,” she explained and turned toward the spiral staircase.

“We leave this way,” Isobe called after her.  He led her to a door that opened on to a terrace.  Here a brisk breeze quickly dissipated the stench.  They were on the opposite side of the mountain from Tlaloc.  The view from here looked out toward the south and east over a range of saw-tooth mountains. At the horizon she could see the glittering blue of the sea. In that direction across the water lay the Sonoran desert.  Fishing boats dotted the placid waters.

“At first, when Peter comes to me, he wants small house,” Isobe said mournfully as they loitered to take in the view.  “Retreat — like mountain cabin. Japanese style. Very pure, very simple.  No inside, no outside. Open to sky, to stars, wind walks through.   This interests me.  So many gigantic buildings I have built.  Eighty stories, hundred stories.  Architecture of the ego.  Crazy shapes like making war on nature.  This I think will be antidote for grandiosity.  But then, as you see, Peter wants more and more.  Big house, like palace.  I ask, ‘How big?’  He says,
‘Big!’
  I say, ‘Perhaps you want Aztec temple.’  I am, of course, being sarcastic.  ‘Exactly!’ Peter says.  So we tear down retreat and build snake house.”  He made a sweeping gesture toward the southern reach of the peninsula.  “Someday, all the way down, nothing but big homes.  Resorts, highway, powerlines, shopping mall.  Richies like DeLeon all the way down.  There should be a law, stay away, live in the city, hands off.  Mountains and deserts are more beautiful.”  His hair, still damp from the pool, lay tangled around his shoulders and webbed across his face. “When I was little boy in Japan, my family lived in a very small house. A house made of paper, bamboo.  In a strong wind, it could blow down.  We were poor people.  Five children, mother, father, grandmother.  We had two rooms, but always they were very clean, very pure.  My father was an artist.  With his brush, he could make a simple line, like that.  The line was in his muscle.  Like that. He had the flow. He made our house very beautiful.  A few chairs, a table, some flowers.  I grow up in two rooms with excellent taste.  Now I build big crazy houses for millionaires with terrible taste.  Big crazy hotels, big crazy high rise.  Nothing as beautiful as my father could make.  You understand this?”

“Yes,” she said.  “I understand.  Things get out of control.  Medicine — my field — is getting out of control.  There seem to be no limits.  There are warnings, but nobody listens.”

His face darkened with sorrow. “Yes, you would know.  With science is worse.  Science plays tricks on nature.  Someday, world of monsters.”  She became aware that he was staring at her.  She smiled weakly, then turned away, hoping he would stop.   But when she looked back, his eyes were still on her.  “What is most beautiful?” he asked.  “Wisdom.  You are very wise doctor.  I see.”  He turned and led Julia up a steep set of stairs that cut back to the house.  On the long climb upward she quickly fell behind, stopping to catch her breath.  Isobe, taking two steps at a time with his hands clasped behind his back, continued onward lost in his own thoughts, never looking back.  When she reached to top of the stairs he was nowhere in sight.

***

That night she was invited to dine with the lord of the manor.  Aaron was invited too, but declined.  “This meeting is for you, not me.  You’ll do better with him and his guests on your own.  He feels intimidated by me.  That makes him defensive, sometimes nasty.  He’s one of those men.”

“Meaning?”

“He has to dominate every gathering.  Either he’s everything or he feels he’s nothing.  He likes you for being smart, as long as you’re not smarter than him.”

“So I have to be careful or I’m out on my ear?”

“No.  I want you here, so that’s settled.”

The week before, Freda, a member of DeLeon’s staff at Santa Lazaro, had been delegated to select more clothing for Julia.  Basic things.  Skirts, blouses, underwear, shoes. Freda had succeeded in getting a reasonably comfortable fit and had kept her choices thankfully modest, if not dowdy.  Aaron, looking her over, chuckled.  “They think of you as a mendicant saint.  If you showed up looking too chic, you’d destroy the image.  The plainer the better.  Peter would probably prefer to see you in rags.  It would make you more dependent.”

“You make Peter sound quite obnoxious.”

“How do you think anybody gets as rich as he is?”

She took his advice.  She wore a white blouse and dark skirt with a plain shawl.  She skinned her hair back into a tight bun and wore no make-up.

“Perfect,” Aaron said. when he saw her.  “The only way you might improve on that would be to go barefoot and show your stigmata.”

DeLeon was late to dinner by nearly an hour, but Sylvana seemed well-rehearsed in long hospitable delays.  She made do with aperitifs and small talk about celebrities she had known.  Her list of long by-gone credits included a run of Italian directors and a parallel list of leading men.  Julia had been told it would be a simple dinner.  Perhaps so by Sylvana’s standards, but she found the appetizers alone to be lavish.  Julia gathered that Freda, a quiet woman who wore her long blond hair like a mask over her face, was Peter’s current concubine, or perhaps he kept his women on some rotation system.  There were two other guests at the table.  Florio, Sylvana’s handsome young masseur, sat to her left.  In looks and in build he differed radically from the small, emaciated man who sat to Sylvana’s right.  He was introduced as Dr. Horvath, Sylvana’s personal physician.  He was a man of perhaps sixty who wore a terminally phlegmatic expression as if he might have been dragged into the room from a deep sleep.  He was well-dressed, almost too formally for the occasion, but Julia guessed that the physique beneath his clothes was nearly skeletal.  When he spoke, there was an odd twist to his lip that made everything he said seem like a statement of severe disapproval.  He leaned close to tell Julia, “We must have a good talk.”  He spoke with a pan-European accent. “If you have need of any medications, any equipment, please do not hesitate to let me know.  We have an excellent little dispensary.  You must let me show you.”

“I’m not in practice any longer,” Julia answered.

Dr. Horvath made an exaggerated expression of understanding.  “Yes, yes, I understand the need for discretion.”  He raised a long, thin finger and placed it across his lips.  His eyes, mere slits, were hidden behind lids so heavily veined they seemed too heavy to stay open.  “In your work, have you made use of caloric restriction?”