The Horses of the Night (16 page)

My father, dead for eight years, sat stretching, as he always had when forced to wait, a way of releasing his cheerful impatience. He flexed, his fingers interlocked, his arms extended: handsome, graying. He wore one of his hunting shirts, a wool check that looked manly and outdoorsy, hand-tailored, and, I knew, as soft and easy to the touch as old linen. He stood and looked at me, as though wondering at my reason for holding back.

I had backed all the way into a corner. I wedged myself among wall studs and strips of lath, the vise of the corner gripping my skull as though it would have me look hard at this human figure, this wraith that looked as solid and breathing as any man I had ever seen.

He gave that half-smile, that eye-crinkling grin that I had known for so many years. He looked a little embarrassed at his sudden appearance; he had always preferred the low key to the dramatic. “I'm proud of you, Stratton.”

His words, so exactly what I needed, and wanted, to hear, suffocated me.

“You have,” he said, “done well.”

I commanded myself: Don't listen.

“I knew you would. All those years of drawing. I remember watching you draw the Ferry Building one afternoon, do you remember?”

Madness. Can't be happening.

“I'd had lunch at Tadich's, I think it was, and was taking a stroll. And I came upon you, sitting there on the sidewalk, drawing the hands on the Ferry Building clock. I think that's the first time I really knew what sort of person you were.”

I commanded myself: Whatever you do—don't talk.

My father watched the fire, shadows shifting on his face. “What are you going to do now?”

I would not speak.

“You can't turn back, now, Stratton, because They've already done too much for you.” The voice was reasonable, earnest.

Just stand here against the wall and don't make a sound.

“Besides, now you're in real trouble. The DeVere people are busy right now, this minute. They'll never forgive you.”

He regarded me, waiting for me to respond.

“You have a responsibility to your mother. To Nona, and her children. To your brother. To yourself. You have a great deal to protect.”

My own voice was a hiss. “What are you?”

He did not answer my question. “You have to accept what has happened to you, and take it seriously.” It was my father's old tone, a lecture both formal and kind, like a vicar on a Sunday afternoon, still warmed by his own morning sermon. He stepped toward me, and when he stood just before me he stretched out his arms. “We're allowed to have a bear hug.”

It's the way he always put it: a bear hug. The phrase allowed us to pretend we engaged in a brief tussle rather than a show of love.

I did not move.

He chuckled. He put forth his hand, and a palsy overtook me. And yet I could not flinch, wedged in as I was. My breath stopped. His fingers approached my face, and my eyes froze in my head.

He touched me. His fingers brushed the tears on my cheek. See, his eyes said. You can't pretend any longer. I am here.

“I missed you,” I coughed, the words painful. “I missed you so much.”

He held me, firm, warm, solidly corporeal: my father.

I withdrew from his arms, but kept him by the hand. I took a step so he would turn and the light could play across his features. Every detail was correct, including the tiny scar on the bridge of his nose, a childhood injury, the family nurse bumping him against the rail of a balcony. He was not a vague copy. He was himself. He looked as he did that day, relaxed, ready to spend a day on the bay, or hiking the East Bay hills, a man arrived at both health and wisdom.

“Mother,” I said, steering toward profound understatement, “isn't doing so well.”

“I know.”

I had trouble speaking.

“You should go visit her more often, Stratton,” he said. “I know it's difficult. I know the doctors don't think it's a good idea. But you don't know how confused she is most of the time.”

My eyes were downcast. “I'll go see her.” But then I rallied, aware again after a few moments what an enormity was taking place. My voice was a whisper. “But this can't be.”

“They are so powerful, Stratton. So powerful that the ways of fire and skies are like toys to Them.”

It was my father's diction, a man who would have loved to be a priest or a professor, a teacher or an actor, someone in command of the attentions and the affections of thousands. Instead, he had been a solitary public figure, and the only vocabulary his position offered was that of money. He had endowed scholarships and research, and he had saved his lectures for his family—for me. My mother had always been courteously detached from my father, despite her great love for him. She was more worshipful than attentive, and Rick had always played the role of the restless kid, the itchy youngster, even in early manhood.

“You left things in a mess,” I said, steadying my voice. “Financially we were in bad shape. And you shouldn't have trusted Mother. Leaving so much in her hands didn't turn out to be the best alternative.”

My voice lost strength. Here I was chiding a shade, an apparition I both longed to hold again, and did not believe was anything but an illusion.

“I know it, Stratton,” he said with what sounded like his old, gruff-voiced regret. “I know I made mistakes. I didn't know I was going to vanish like that, walking down the stairs. I walked and walked, and then I realized I was not walking at all, anymore. My face went numb.
Bang
—like being hit with the Sunday paper. And then—” He looked at me steadily. “It makes a noise, dying like that. A noise in your skull, in your brain.” He kept my gaze, telling me: I know, and you, my son, do not.

Then a smile crinkled his eyes. “Don't stand here like this. Come and sit down. And what on earth is happening here? I thought you were a designer. Plaster dust everywhere.”

I stayed where I was.

“I'm not here for long. I'm here to prepare you. You should go upstairs and get dressed. Someone is coming for you.”

I shook my head.

“You have no choice anymore, Stratton. The powers you have enjoined are at your beck, but not at your command.”

This odd phrasing
could
have been my father's, but it sounded strangely unlike any statement I had ever heard him use. His diction had always been bookish, both straightforward and polished. “Rick is doing fine,” I said, offering him news, buying time while I tried to believe that this creature was, in truth, my father.

“I remember how upset you were,” he said. “When you thought you had hit him so hard sparring. You were under the impression that you had permanently damaged him.” He sighed, half laugh, half sorrow. “You were the son I was fondest of, Stratton. You must have known that.”

Emotion swept me, seared me. When I could speak, I said, “I was worried about Rick. I always worry about him.” Again I was aware of water on my cheeks, and used the sleeve of my terrycloth robe to wipe my eyes.

“You've spent too much of your life worrying,” he said. “You've been concerned with the good opinion of people who should not have mattered to you. It's time to give something to yourself, or, as Buddha would suggest, to accept that which is given to you.”

“It's not easy being your son,” I said. “You were so admired by everyone. Including me.”

“I deserved the admiration. It's true—I did. But I neglected you. I overlooked the people around me, wanting more. More than a man should want.”

I prepared my question guardedly, choosing the words. “What are these powers being offered to me?” I lowered my voice. I did not want to ask the next question. “And who offers them?”

He put his hands in his pockets, in a way that meant: At least we are talking business. It was another gesture I recognized from former times. “Someone is coming to see you.”

“I don't want to see anyone.”

“It doesn't matter.” His voice was light, manly, but his words were so at odds with his tone that I was not certain that I had heard them correctly.

I turned away, feeling a stubborn twist inside me.

He continued, “Accommodate Them—you have no choice.”

“The soul,” I said, my voice ragged. “So we have souls, after all.”

“Who mentioned the soul? You're confused, Stratton. The soul has nothing to do with this.” He thought for a moment. “But maybe that's the best way for you to understand this. You remember the story. The Faust myth. A man interested in magic—in the darker kind of magic—makes a pact with Satan. He does it for power, and for knowledge.”

“I'm familiar with the tale,” I responded, my voice hoarse.

“He has years of power, and even makes love to Helen of Troy.” He smiled, as though seeing it before his eyes, the copulation between Faust and the immortal. “In Marlow's
Dr. Faustus
, when Faustus knows that he is lost, he stands looking upward on the last night of his life and he utters an apostrophe, to the sky, to the rolling of the planet that gave him life. It's a line fashioned from Ovid. ‘
O lente, lente, currite noctis equi
.'” He paused, as though uttering Latin took his breath away. “‘Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night.' But the night is never slow enough. It always ends. Once you have enjoyed congress with these powers, you will not escape.”

“Faustus could have escaped.”

He tilted his head. We had loved our philosophical jousts. “How?”

The argument was one I did not believe, but we were so far into the cellar of theology that my own opinions barely mattered. “By asking God's forgiveness.” Perhaps I had expected the air around me to throb when I spoke of God, but there was no sound, no movement.

“It was too late.”

The argument belonged in an all-night drinking session, matching whiskeys with one of my ex-Jesuit tutors. I felt my innards contract, as at the sight of my own name on a death warrant. “I don't like this.”

“They come for you tonight. Don't make the mistake of hubris, on the one hand, believing you can outwit Them, or cowardice on the other, attempting to flee. You have lost all your freedoms. It's time to accept your prize.”

“I have entered into no contract.”

“You have, just as Rick has so many times in dealing with loan sharks, just as I did in agreeing to a price for a work of art at an auction by waggling my fingers.”

“I've done nothing.”

He lifted his hand. “You're about to say that you're innocent.” It was my father's tone exactly, the way he didn't look at my eyes when he spoke but looked to one side, as though playing to an invisible audience.

This is all incredible—and yet, why not play along for awhile? Choose your questions carefully. “Why,” I asked, “do they want me?”

“Who can say?”

He looked younger than I would have expected. My next words were a shock to me. They were heavy, ugly. “You're dead.” I did not mean this to sound as wooden as it did. When my father laughed, I recognized beyond doubt that whether this was an illusion or not, this phantom captured exactly my father's gentle imperiousness, his humor, his impatience.

I saw, too, how much I had changed in the last eight years. Eight years ago I had been twenty-seven, and an immature man, in some ways, eager to win my father's approval, eager to establish my name in a profession. Now I was not so hungry for praise, from my father, or from anyone else.

I did not move. I did not believe it. It looked and sounded right, but it was not.

“You have to get dressed.”

“Does it matter what I'm wearing?”

“You are about to engage in an important transaction. Your allies understand the importance of costume. You don't,” he said, quietly exasperated, as so often, “have that much time, Stratton.”

“I would have thought that the powers we enjoined were timeless.”

He made a cheerful gesture, waving off my remark. “We aren't.”

“Not even the dead?”

“One of us is still alive.”

It was his sort of argument. I saw how equal we were in intelligence, in temperament. I suspended judgment. This was my father, and yet it could not be. I loved this man, this fleshly, apparently real human being, and yet I was not certain what this creature might really be. In radical, stoic confusion I ascended the steps to change my clothes, and reserved all critical judgment. I was experiencing something no man ever really experienced. And yet here I was. I could not understand it; I stopped trying.

I turned back, and there was his figure in the hallway, looking upward. He even cast a shadow, a long, distorted shape flowing behind him across the koa-wood floor.

“Wear a business suit,” he prompted. “Nothing too formal.”

“We're going to be doing business, are we?” I asked, intending irony.

“You
are,” he said.

“Will you,” I asked, fighting to keep the tremor from my voice, “stay with me?”

“Not for much longer.” He saw my pain. “I can't.”

“I won't leave you.”

“I promise you that I'll wait.”

I was going to lose him, all over again. I could not take another step. I wanted to throw myself back down the stairway and cling to him. The fact of his physical presence, the fact of his fatherhood, struck me as thoroughly as the force of gravity, or the heat of a fire.

“I will wait right here. I promise. Please hurry, Stratton.” It was the way he had urged me as a boy, as I dallied, toying with my socks, fighting with my brother over a favorite toy. The taste of my own childhood was in my mouth. This was not nostalgia. It was all back again, all here. My father had returned, and joy was beginning to flower in my heart. I saw that anything good was possible.

I hurried into the sort of suit that I would wear to a board meeting to stand before myopic capitalists with a pointer and blueprints. I was, without thinking, dressing as a young man would, to please his father.