The Crystal Child (27 page)

Julia was surprised at how rapidly she settled into the routine of her new home.  A year in prison was the perfect preparation for the quiet isolation she was experiencing.  She had learned how to live without the news of the day, without phone calls and email messages, without appointments and obligations.  She had spent a year at Stockton viewing all that happened beyond the walls of Stockton as the outside world, a world that had abandoned her and which she was therefore free to dismiss from her thoughts.  Its issues, its problems, its fads and fashions belonged to another planet.  There was a room in Tlaloc set aside for television, but she had never gone there.  For that matter, she had never seen anybody enter or leave the room except a few servants stealing some time away from their duties to catch a soap opera or a sports event.  Newspapers and magazines came to the house, usually a heap of them all at once brought from San Lazaro when one of the drivers remembered to gather them up.  She had seen DeLeon and Horvath digging through to find the life-extension publications; there were also some tacky looking religious and occult magazines that Sylvana carried off to her quarters.  Julia usually came last to pick through.  With the exception of a few cultural publications — an art magazine, a few scientific quarterlies that she treated with mild curiosity — she left the rest to be scrapped.

There was also one welcome difference between Stockton and Tlaloc.  Prison had rarely been private and never quiet. At all hours guards called out and slammed doors.  The television in the commons room stayed on night and day, even when there was no one watching.  At any moment an inmate might go off her head and begin wailing.  Here, in the  upper stories of this mountain-top palace, there was nothing but the wind or the occasional call of a bird to interrupt the deep silence of the land. Even when the rains came in their season, they were gentle visitors, a ghostly murmur sweeping through the trees.  Tlaloc was so large and labyrinthine that she could spend an entire day wandering in a distant wing and never cross paths with anyone except occasional scurrying servants, local women who spoke little English and were strenuously obeisant.  She had not been quick to investigate the house, but deliberately left whole floors unexplored, preferring to treat the house as a sort of interior wilderness.  She had no idea what to expect when she turned a corner or came upon an alcove.  In time, if she stayed on, she would learn the layout of the house, but for now she enjoyed the atmosphere of adventure that enveloped its rooms and corridors.  The house was so spacious, it was easy enough to keep to oneself.  Even when Sylvana was entertaining a van-load of guests from San Lazaro, Julia could retire to her own apartment and feel she was miles away.

Sylvana was the most constant occupant of the house, she and her retinue of young and brawny health providers.  Julia rarely encountered her, though she had a standing invitation to dine with Sylvana any time she pleased or to attend any of her social occasions.   So far Julia had begged off, preferring to eat alone or occasionally with Aaron, even though taking meals with Aaron had become a chore.  He was now an erratic eater.  He might ask for food at strange hours — and never more than small amounts.  Often, as far as she could tell, he consumed nothing more than juices for days at a time.  Eventually she might have to spend more time with DeLeon and Sylvana, but Aaron’s preferences seemed to carry weight with both of his hosts.  If Julia claimed that Aaron wanted her company, that settled the matter.  He was the honored guest of the household, and she was his chosen companion.

DeLeon’s appearances were erratic.  He might show up at any hour on any day, whenever he grew restless at the Institute.  Usually he arrived by car, but sometimes he was flown in by his own helicopter, roaring over the house and settling on the mountain-top landing pad in a cloud of dust.   Judging by their affectionate greetings whenever they met, Julia assumed DeLeon and Sylvana were lovers, though Sylvana purported to be living a celibate life as part of her life-extension regimen.  That was hard to believe, given her coquettish behavior with her masseur and yoga master.  Not that Julia cared, but hints of such liaisons thickened the air of casual decadence that permeated everything about Peter DeLeon’s life.  Tlaloc had picked up a reputation on the celebrity circuit: an invitation to DeLeon’s mysterious mountain retreat was a favor made available only to the privileged few.  The guests were frequently women from San Lazaro, wealthy or good-looking admirers who were more than willing to indulge themselves in fantasies of sexual rejuvenation.  They were a constant feature of Tlaloc, lounging by the pool or walking in the lavish cactus garden.  Sylvana might be with them, apparently lending her approval to whatever the arrangement might be — though it was not difficult to guess.  An invitation to share the Lord of Longevity’s bed was no doubt a tale that would bear countless retellings.

Mercifully, DeLeon agreed to keep Julia away from visitors for as long as she wished, but he insisted on having time with her — lunch or cocktails — whenever he stayed at Tlaloc.  She knew how eager DeLeon was to query her about Aaron, but he seemed to feel there was all the time in the world.  Maybe there was.  Maybe she would be here for years, fending off DeLeon’s curiosity.  Meanwhile, he could not restrain himself: he was sure he could win her over to one or another of his life-extension schemes.  Whenever he had one of these brainstorms, his eyes brightened and his manner became euphoric.  At times, his enthusiasm for the latest anti-aging remedy could be so childlike that Julia was beginning to believe he took his absurd method seriously.  Had she heard about “potentiated natural waters,” he asked one day when she happened upon him and Horvath in the breakfast room.  Plans to franchise the medication were already under way.  Horvath explained the concoction.  It consisted of “a barely discernible, homeopathic trace distilled from the body fluids of ageless beauties.”  The beauties were mainly models and movie stars who were numbered among the DeLeon Institute’s alumnae.

“I won’t ask what fluids these are,” Julia replied.  “But I do hope you’re not thinking of having people drink it.”

“No, no,” Horvath answered, lifting one eyebrow as if amazed she should suggest such a thing.  “It would be compounded into aloe verde cream for topical application.  You rub it in, you see, to share the beauty, which is of course of the skin.”

“Oh,” Julia said.  “And it penetrates all the way through to the bone marrow, I suppose.  Well, make sure you mix it with a lot of alcohol.  That way it will be completely innocuous.” Horvath gave her another raised eyebrow in response.  Ideas like this were, in Julia’s eyes, too silly to take seriously.  Caught up in discussions like this, she would let DeLeon and Horvath babble on, listening politely to their zany ideas, never bothering to criticize or correct.  Perhaps if she thought of her time at Tlaloc as entertainment, the days would pass painlessly.  Though she did not intend it, her sphinx-like silence helped create an aura of authority.

Little by little, Tlaloc assumed a bizarre psychological design for Julia.  She thought of the mansion as two realms.  Upstairs and downstairs, Olympus and the underworld.  Upstairs was Aaron’s realm, a world ruled by a seemingly ageless boy, the son of Cronos who lived beyond all the principles and assumptions of medical science.  There, in his suite of rooms and hers, mythology was the mind’s proper language.  Old mysteries, old deities reigned again.  Downstairs belonged to a lesser breed, a race of trolls and dwarves struggling feverishly to add a day, a week, a year to their benighted lives.  It was not simply their chicanery and gullibility that set them — DeLeon, Horvath, Sylvana, and their many guests — apart.  It was also their desperation.  Some who visited were sincere physicians, doctors exploring the fringes of gerontology as Julia once had, seeking unlikely remedies, arcane practices.  They too were obsessed with the search for immortality.  If they could find a way to lengthen the life span by a few hours, they would consider it a triumph.  It would bring fame and fortune — and a small reprieve from death.  Julia now viewed all that happened in this underworld of life extenders with pity.  They were misguided, both the ignorant and the knowledgeable.  What they sought — youth that never faded — was not to be found in physiology or genetics.  Aaron had been right that day when he insisted so vehemently, “You’re all looking in the wrong direction and I can’t get you to turn around.”

What are we missing, she had asked.  His answer, still incomprehensible to her, had been, “You need to go
forward
, not back. … all the way forward.”

And here she was, a woman torn between the two realms, the reluctant physician, the uninitiated sorceress who had presided over a miracle she could not explain.  When she left Aaron’s rooms, the air that filled Tlaloc became heavy and rancid, the atmosphere of a lower level of being.  In that underworld, nothing magical, nothing sacred survived; the frenzied search for reputation and profit outweighed everything.  At times she thought of DeLeon as Pluto, dark god of sunless Hades, ensconced amid his treasures, more feared and hated than any of his Olympian kin, and more densely shrouded in mystery.  Her reading had taught her something about the evolution of Hades.  In the ancient world the underground kingdom was popularly remembered as a place of fire and brimstone where punishment was meted out as if it were a court of divine law.  That became Dante’s Hell, the domain of retribution.  But the myths remembered an earlier, more maniacal version of Hell.  Once Pluto’s kingdom was the most remote and guarded of mythical realms.  It was the least human of places in the ancient cosmos — and also the richest.  That was where the treasure was, vast stores of gold and jewels hidden from the light of day, defended with a mad possessiveness.  To live as King Pluto lived — isolated, watchful, secretive — was the true damnation.  Julia had already met the hounds of DeLeon’s Hades, the armed guards who were there to drive off all intruders.  The safest of all places to hide, perhaps.  But those who entered never returned.

These images troubled her, made her feel trapped and vulnerable.  Was Peter DeLeon really so dangerous to her?  Aaron had no fear of him.  Aaron treated him with contempt.  “The man’s a clown, a cunning clown,” he had once said.  DeLeon the clown — was that closer to the truth?  Every myth needs its capricious trickster for whom nothing is sacred, the fool who trips himself up and takes the pratfall.  Loki, Coyote — a touch of mirth in the midst of the violence and treachery, Shakespeare’s Puck, who “frights the maidens of the villagery.”  She remembered tales about these rascal gods.  Their appearance was always a jarring digression, as if to warn against taking it all too seriously.  Hermes was chief among them, the Tom Sawyer of Olympus, kept at Zeus’s side for amusement. He was also the patron of the thieves and liars, whose talents he readily borrowed.  His first act in life was to steal Apollo’s cattle, but then he won back the furious god’s favor by playing ever so sweetly on his lyre.  Nobody disliked Hermes; he was too charming.

Almost a perfect description of Peter Kastenbach-DeLeon, wasn’t it?  Charlatan extraordinaire, buffoon to the elite, trickster who delighted in hoodwinking his clients.  Though a total fraud, what real harm did he do?  He led the wishful where they wanted to go, conjured up images of everlasting youth, gave them permission to carry on like randy adolescents and, in the process, filled his purse.

“Did you know that Hermes was the father of Pan?” she asked Aaron one day at dinner.  She had found several books on mythology in his library, many of them heavily marked in the margins.  They were Aaron’s marks, often crabbed little comments too illegible to read.

“Yes.  Didn’t you know?” Aaron answered.  The plate in front of him contained little more than some sliced fruit over which he dawdled, moving the pieces around, finally leaving them uneaten.  There was also a fruit-juice tonic that DeLeon had concocted, the one thing DeLeon did that had elicited a favorable comment from Aaron.  He described the drink as a boat load of antioxidants.

“How would you interpret that?” Julia asked.  “Why should Pan be the son of Hermes?”

He looked up, his eyes brightening.  “Pan.  Yes, Pan is the sprite who creates pandemonium, the original spreader of chaos. He can be very frightening in that way, mainly because he releases the wildness inside us.  Pan overcomes all inhibitions, throws out all the rules.  Like father, like son.  After all, he’s the son of a jolly prankster. He was also a great woman chaser.  Dryads, nymphs, fauns, he ravished them all.”

“There’s a deal of that in Peter, don’t you think?”

Aaron was puzzled.  “DeLeon?  As Pan?”

“You called him a clown.  I think you’re right.  He’s Pan and Hermes rolled into one, the hoaxster and the lecher.”

For the first time since she had arrived, Aaron burst out laughing.  “Of course!  Tlaloc’s comic relief. Every kingdom needs its jester.  And do you realize what chaos it would be if Peter succeeded in loosing immortality upon the world?”

***

There was one more regular visitor.  Isobe was on the grounds more often than DeLeon, making sketches, taking measurements, overseeing some improvement or renovation.   He might turn up anywhere, in an unfinished wing, on a staircase, in the cactus garden.  On these occasions, he never failed to seek out Julia, inviting her to dine with him or meet for drinks.  At a certain point, she realized she was waiting for him to visit again.  He had become indispensable to her.  All the more so as Aaron became more withdrawn, more secretive.  What choice did she have?  To become an indoor recluse? The mad woman hiding in the closet?  Isobe was the one bright moment in her life, an island of sanity. He brought her books and magazines, playfully trying to guess what she might care to read.  A classic novel?  A recent bestseller?  A heavy scientific journal?.  He liked especially to bring her something he had read and found intriguing — a subject of discussion.  Often he assumed a role: the inquiring foreigner doing his best to understand western civilization.  It was little more than a pretense for someone who ranked as one of the world’s leading architects, but it was an amusing distraction that turned the books he brought into reading assignments. 
Don Quixote
, which Julia could hardly remember from her college days, was a great favorite of his.  “It is great Buddhist work,” he informed her.