The Golem of Hollywood (23 page)

F
ather always said that souls passed from the earth and returned to the garden, to reside for eternity in closeness to the Lord.

Asham, falling, sees the ground screaming toward her and hears Cain screaming betrayal in her ear and her chief thought is a peaceful one: soon she'll be with Abel, forever. As her tumbling body picks up speed, and the stones of the tower streak past like clay comets, Cain with a wounded shriek spirals away into oblivion, and it occurs to her that—if what she was told was true—he'll be there, too, forever.

She hadn't considered that part of it.

She does not have time to decide what she'll say to him before she dies.

—

N
OTHING
SHE
WAS
TOLD
is true.

No garden.

No Abel.

No Cain, either. That's a relief.

She's right where she landed, standing on the ground.

All around her is chaos, a terrifying din that drives her to crouch and cover her ears.

She has no hands to cover them with.

She has no ears to cover.

She is not crouching.

She has no feet.

She has no legs, either. She's not actually standing but—

What?

She's existing.

She tries to cry, has no lungs, no throat, no lips, no tongue, no mouth.

The chaos is men, hordes of them. They've dropped their axes and are running; they pour off the tower, sprinting past her, carrying torches, cloth, jugs of water. Their voices are louder than a pack of beasts and Asham fails and fails to cry.

A sweet voice: Don't be frightened.

Before her stands a woman on fire, beautiful face smoldering with compassion and wrath.

Asham screams; nothing comes out.

You're confused, the woman says. It's understandable.

The woman puts out a fiery hand. Here.

I don't understand.

The woman smiles. There. Nicely done.

Asham has said nothing yet the woman heard her.

You're trying too hard, the woman says. You have to let it come naturally.

What?

That.

This?

Excellent. You'll get better with practice. The woman smiles. My name is Gabriella.

Your clothes, Asham says. Your hair.

I know. It takes me forever to get ready in the morning.

Asham doesn't know what to say.

A joke, Gabriella says.

Oh. Asham feels calmer, now that she can communicate. She looks around. Where am I?

Technically, you're right where you were a moment ago.

I—I am?

Yes.

Where?

See for yourself?

How?

Gabriella says, See.

For Asham to see requires that she exert herself. Like standing on her head or balancing on one foot. It isn't a matter of moving her body or her eyes but of projecting her will. Her perspective waddles here and there like a newborn chick, alighting on the smoke rising from the kilns, the outline of the unfinished tower, the mules with their besmirched hindquarters.

Good, Gabriella says. That's very good.

Asham beholds the focal point of the commotion, a stand of collapsed scaffolding.

Is that me? My body?

No. Cain's.

How'd he get way over there?

He hit a beam on the way down.

Asham winces. Where am I?

Gabriella smiles sadly. Right there.

Asham shifts below.

Beneath her hovering presence, her body lies in pieces.

Her limbs are split, her bowels strewn, her head obliterated.

She emits a cry of grief.

It's hard, Gabriella says. I know.

I was so beautiful.

Yes, you were.

Why are they there, with him? Why does no one come to care for me?

He was their leader. You killed him.

Asham weeps without weeping.

—

F
OR
SEVEN
DAYS
, Gabriella sings to her.

As painful as needles to the flesh of the living,

so is the destruction of the body to the spirit to which it once cleaved.

   
It is

the shattering of a fine vessel;

the collapse of blown glass;

the casting off of an anchor;

the razing of a temple.

Gabriella stops singing.

All right, she says. That's enough of that.

And she spirits Asham away on a warm western wind, raising her over the world, a shifting patchwork of color. Boastful yellows, living greens, the steady marine of peace.

What is this? Asham asks.

Mankind, Gabriella says. Look.

Where?

Come with me, Gabriella says, taking her hand.

Their perspective shrinks.

In the city that bears his name, Enoch stands before his father's funeral pyre.

A gray aura surrounds him.

Perched at his side, the dog sticks out its tongue, licks his hand.

Enoch glares at it.

A priest is chanting the funerary rites.

The dog again licks Enoch's fingers.

Stop it, he says.

It whimpers. Sticks out its tongue.

Enoch lashes out, striking it across the muzzle.

The dog yelps and flees.

What's the matter with him? Asham says. Why would he do that?

He's angry, Gabriella says. Look.

They shift again, and Enoch, a young man of fifteen, crowned in gold, sits upon the throne. The gray around him has thickened, a
mucoid mass that pulses and oozes and drips. His face is a stone as he listens to the pleas of his advisers. There are not enough men to complete the tower, they tell him. There is not enough money. The treasurer rises to speak and Enoch takes a gray sword from his belt and drives it through the man's heart, which spurts.

He always was his father's son, Gabriella says. What was good in him has been extinguished.

I didn't mean for this to happen, Asham says.

Nobody ever does.

Please. I don't want to see any more.

I'm sorry to have to show this to you. Look.

Enoch, a young man of twenty-two, rides out of the valley amid a rumbling gray cloud, leading his army to war. They return with a caravan of captives and treasure. The prisoners are brought to the marketplace where once Asham walked with the boy, laughing and eating fruit. Ten of the vanquished are tied to posts, whipped until their skin hangs in strips before being beheaded as examples. Of the rest, the women and children are sold for private use and the men strung together with gray chains and sent to work on the tower, where they all die eventually, their skulls staved in by falling bricks, their chests crushed under timber piles, diseased and hacking up blood.

Please, Asham moans. Stop it.

But Gabriella gently insists. It's the way of this world. Look.

A vengeful tribe arrives at the valley to make war upon Enoch.

Blood flows in the gray streets.

What have I done. What have I done.

Look.

Enoch, an old man of forty, encased in a hard gray shell, dies at the hand of his own son, who kills his brothers and ascends to the throne.

All right, Gabriella says. I think you get the point.

Aloft, they leap eons. The gray mucus continues to spread. It overflows
the valley; it washes across the plains and mountains; between the reds of lust and the golds of joy it fills the gaps, overruns them, hardening like mortar along the borders of nations, its advance mindless and ravenous and inevitable.

Gabriella says, We begged Him not to allow this. We said, What is man, that You are mindful of him?

I wanted justice, Asham says.

And yet you wrought more death.

In a gray alley of a distant gray city, gray men hold down a woman. Her screams, purple and fungal, catch the attention of a passerby, who watches what is happening for a moment and then walks on, leaving gray footprints.

Make it stop, Asham says. Please.

One thing at a time.

How can you say that? Look what they're doing to her.

No, Gabriella says. I mean: I can only do one thing at a time. I'm here with you, so I can't help her.

Then
go
.

Gabriella shakes her head, trailing flame. It's not my charter.

A gray fog cloaks the woman, and she is gone, and silence prevails.

Call it a question of jurisdiction, Gabriella says. The world was not given to us, but to men.

She pauses. They're doing a terrible job, mind you.

They rise, watching the gray as it smothers the surface of the earth.

It's really a mess down there. It's gotten so bad He's thinking of starting over.

I'm a monster, Asham says.

No. It only seems that way to you, because you see the consequences of your deeds. Go forward. Learn from your mistakes. Turn a negative into a positive. Right? Gabriella puts a burning arm around her, squeezes. That's where you come in.

Me?

Gabriella nods. If you want. I can't get involved, but you can.

Anything, Asham says. Anything to make it right.

You're sure? If you agree, you will be committed to this pursuit.

I agree. I'm committed.

Gabriella opens the ledger. Sign here.

Asham looks at the book. Its pages are white fire, and for a moment she hesitates.

What's wrong? Gabriella asks.

Nothing. I just—what am I signing?

Gabriella's expression grows fearsome. You want to help, don't you?

Yes. Yes. Of course.

Then sign.

Asham thinks of the gray world and thinks of her ravaged self. What else remains, if not to correct the wrong she has done? She commits herself, and when she looks at the book again, her name has appeared in letters of black fire, tremulous against the white fire of the page.

Other figures appear on the fringes of her perception, arrayed in ghostly semicircles, their tall forms nodding at her; they come from all directions, borne in on waves of earth and crests of wind, their faces numbered one and two and three and four, reflecting an eternal light. Prominent among them stands the man Michael, who smiles his sad smile and says, You have chosen. You can't go back.

The tall figures around him nod. Something in their eyes frightens Asham: their single-minded stares.

The planet has gone chillingly gray, from one end to the next.

Asham says, When do I begin?

It's not time yet, Gabriella says.

Asham looks down at the world, up at eternity. Until then? Where do I go? What do I do?

Gabriella smiles at her. Touches her cheek.

Sleep.

J
acob shuffled off the jetway in Prague having slept two hours of eighteen. Much of those 120 minutes had been occupied by muddled green dreams: Mai, old tools, his mother babbling manically to his father, his father pretending to understand.

The endings of every dream identical: butchered women, facing east.

Bringing up the rear for a zombie-squad of backpackers and businessmen, he advanced down the terminal amid piped-in Lady Gaga, lining up to confront a beagle-faced bureaucrat who scanned and stamped and waved him on into the City of Legends without a second glance.

Some quick math revealed that the spring breakers sharing his bus to town had been born after the Velvet Revolution. Jacob could therefore excuse their enthusiasm on grounds of naïveté. They had, absurdly, dressed the part of early-nineties pioneers, arrived to prospect among the cultural rubble of the Berlin Wall: carrying rolled copies of
The Metamorphosis
and sporting vintage Nirvana T-shirts, inherited from uncles who “were there.”

Feeling ancient, he squinted through scratched plexi at flat polygons of gold and green, periodically relieved by wooded breaks and farmhouses. A quaint countryside diorama that curdled into the present day, one billboard at a time.

Piebald Communist-era apartment blocks appeared, arrayed without logic, like partygoers milling around after the stereo cuts out. At the
outskirts of the city, he noted a lot of construction, much of it halted midway, offering itself up as a canvas for graffiti.

So far, the only legend he'd seen was the one on the complimentary map he'd swiped at the airport, and its only secret was the location of TGI Fridays.

The road rose, then dipped into a shallow valley. An uneven mosaic of burnt-orange roofs rimmed a glaucous coil of river, sun-dappled and sluggish.

The bus lumbered down over a bridge, depositing him at the central station.

He bought a bottle of mineral water and took a tram schedule; changed his mind and set out on foot, trying to stave off jet lag, his carry-on rumbling over sidewalks patterned from black and white stone and grouted with cigarette butts. It was a glorious bath of an afternoon, mellow and dreamy and warm. High, narrow streets snuck up behind him, jackknifing, warping, fracturing into ghostly echoes the whine of a motor scooter, the disco ringtones of cheap phones.

There was something disconcerting about foreign signage, and Czech, with its sibilants, its unexpected letter combinations barbed with diacriticals, read like the words of a madman hissing condemnation.

Yawning, blinking, he walked Hybernská Street beneath the scowl of roofline gargoyles, encountering living faces just as hard, faces not quite Western, not quite Eastern. Proud mouths, slit eyes, young people with rooty, aged hands. They looked mistrustfully at Jacob; looked through him, as though he did not exist, and he found himself crunching his toes in his shoes in an effort to prove that he did, smiling and failing to have it reciprocated.

He gave up on people and turned to architecture, gazing up at a gorgeous, mischievous rogue's gallery of styles. Baroque, Art Nouveau, and rococo shouldered together like strangers on an overcrowded bus. Plaster façades were black with soot or so fresh they appeared wet.

In Republic Square, he paused to wipe his sticky neck and admire the
verdigris cap of the Municipal House before turning north, toward the portion of Old Town squashed by the river's jutting thumb.

The Hostel Nozdra lived up to its one-star rating. As a concession to dignity, he'd sprung for a private room rather than the dormitory. He dragged his bag up four flights and unlocked the door to a linoleum cell equipped with chipped wood laminates and a gimpy chair half turned, as though caught red-handed in some shameful act.

He'd wanted to be judicious with his use of department funds, but not this judicious.

Someone had etched a frowny face in the wall, along with an inscription.

Sarah u broke my heart.

Get used to it, dude.

He stripped to the waist and flopped down, drawing weak protest from the mattress.

His phone had picked up a local carrier. He dialed Jan's number, let it ring ten times. Next he tried the main Prague PD switchboard and got tangled up in a confusing exchange with the wrong guy.

How many Prague cops named Jan?

Roughly as many Johns or Mikes on LAPD.

He called back and asked for Radek.

The switchboard operator began scolding him in Czech.

Jacob ended the call, yawning into the crook of his elbow. If he meant to beat jet lag, a nap was the wrong strategy.

Nobody had ever accused him of excessive discipline. He set an alarm, sank back into a pillowcase redolent of patchouli, and passed out.

—

N
EON
ORANGE
FILTERED
THROUGH
window grime.

He pried his phone out from between the bedframe and the wall.

The alarm had gone off hours ago. He'd slept through it.

And he'd just missed a call.

“Shit
.
”

Mercifully, Jan picked up.

“Ahoj.”

“Hey. Sorry. I couldn't get to the phone.”

In the background, the kids were screaming, as though the tantrum had been ongoing for a week. “Who is this, please?”

“Jacob Lev, LAPD. I called you recently, about a case?”

“Ah-hah. Yes, okay. I remember.”

“You said to get in touch when I came to Prague.”

“Yes, okay.”

“Well, here I am.”

An interlude of slaps and crying.

Jan coughed, cleared his throat. “You are here?”

“Yeah.”

“In Prague?”

“I got in a couple hours ago. This conversation's costing me two bucks a minute, so how bout we finish it in person? Tomorrow work for you?”

“Tomorrrrrrow,” Jan said. “No, I'm sorry, it's very busy. I have many things to do.”

“Saturday, then.”

“This is not good, either.”

“All right, why don't you pick a day?”

“How long do you plan to remain in Czech Republic?”

“Four days.”

“Four days . . . I don't know if it will be possible to meet.”

“Are you kidding me? I flew here to talk to you.”

“This decision was yours, not mine.”

“
You
said—look, man, please, come on. I know a cop's schedule. Nothing's in stone.”

“Perhaps for you this is true.”

“I brought the photos,” Jacob said.

“I don't know any photos.”

“Yes, you do, I told you. Give me your office address. I'll drop them off. You can look and then decide.”

“I apologize,” Jan said, sounding genuinely rueful. “This case is private, there is nothing to discuss.”

Jacob said, “Did someone tell you not to speak to me?”

The phone clattered down, and Jan could be heard yelling at the kids. When he returned he was coughing mightily. “I apologize for your inconvenience,” he said. “There are many things to do in Prague. You will enjoy yourself.”

“Hang on—”

The line went dead.

Jacob stared at the phone in astonishment.

He called back. Ring ring ring ring ring. “Pick up, asshole.”

Hanging up, he gazed out the window, blotting his chest with a handful of rough muslin sheet. It was six p.m. and he was alone in a strange city.

What now?

He hadn't yet made up his mind when the phone shook with a text from an unfamiliar number.

pivnice u rudolfina

10

30 min