PART I

DARKNESS

 

 

 

No one knew where the spring on Mount Terminus originated. They could only conjecture from the warmth of its waters that the aquifer lay deep underground, near the hearth of the Earth. Jacob sounded out for Bloom the hiss and groan he would hear when the vapors rose and expanded into the pipes of their new home. He spoke of flowering gardens and bulky vegetable patches, the scents of citrus groves and the perfume of trees canopied in mentholated leaves, of a narrow promontory pointing like a finger over an ancient seabed to a distant shore, and he said to his son, Please, my dear, tell me you want to see it.

Bloom wanted to say, No, I don’t want to see it. I want to go home.

But he said, instead, Yes, of course, Father, I want to see it all.

For this kindness, Jacob thanked his son, and thanked him again; he bent over and squeezed Bloom tight, pressed his cheek against the stiff collar of his shirt, and, for several moments too long, held him there.

Father and son dwelled in the comfort of prolonged silences thereafter. They listened to the clatter of rails beat the rhythm of their progress across the prairies. On the Sabbath, Jacob covered his head and adorned his shoulders in a prayer shawl. He kindled the light, blessed the wine, the bread. The young Bloom tried to invent an image of the place his father had described, but his thoughts returned to the familiar surface of Woodhaven’s lake mirroring the rise of its valley and its sky, and he recalled memories of his mother standing in profile before a succession of windows.

In the expanse of the Chihuahuan Desert, he awoke from a dream in which he saw just such an ephemeral image, and he called out to his mother, at which time Jacob gently reminded him she was no longer with them. While passing the painted archways of the Sonoran Desert, Bloom wondered aloud how it was possible she could have died so young, and the elder Rosenbloom, who appeared at a loss to answer Bloom, drew for his son an illustration of a heart in its anatomical intricacy, and pointed to its various chambers to better show him how the muscle in his mother’s chest had ceased to function.

Jacob asked the boy if he now comprehended the cause, and Bloom said he did, but, in truth, he didn’t, and even if he had, neither his father’s scientific reason nor the warm touch of his hand would come to fill the desert air with moisture. It wouldn’t soften the stark light of its sun. It wouldn’t curtail the boy’s expectations of seeing his mother’s silhouette materialize in the shadows of their berth.

The train thundered through tunnels and canyon passes, whispered along the outer edges of mountains. When they turned southwest from Mojave into the sierra, they joined the path of a river Bloom mistook for a stream. The thin, lazy current delivered them from the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains onto the great basin. Here the air of their compartment warmed with the scent of orange blossoms and the stench of industry. Opposite the river, foundry stacks disgorged black smoke, wisps of which swept northward on a pulsating breeze, over the flat tops of brick buildings whose uneven lines foregrounded the range. The mountains, the city, their combined measure, the immensity of their weight, the boy felt in his chest, and more so than before, he wanted to retrace the rail lines east so that so he might once again feel the balance of Woodhaven’s valley, watch the August rains thrash its lake, meander the damp trails of its hills, but they had come this far and Bloom knew his father wouldn’t be persuaded to turn back. For reasons the boy couldn’t understand, Jacob was determined to reside here, as if he had been commanded to do so by God. Go forth. Go forth to the desolate end of the world.

There, said his father when the train began to slow, there, ahead, is our new beginning.

A golden dome cast an amber glow onto a sprawling platform where a multitude of hat brims shone with the intensity of small suns. They shadowed the rough-hewn faces of men; they shadowed the softer, rounder features of women. At the center of the throng, in the most luminous point of the dome’s light, were three figures, tall and broad, all approximately the same height and build, standing shoulder to shoulder, dressed identically, wearing in the heat of the afternoon black mackintoshes and black bowler hats, black gloves, black boots, the collective garments so dark they appeared to absorb all the light within their sphere. Bloom was moved to remark what a strange sight the dark triumvirate was, but the boy’s attention had been arrested by the void they formed in the crowd. Before he could turn to make his father aware of the phenomenon, and turn back, the figures had vanished.

What was it? Jacob asked.

Nothing, said Bloom, nothing at all.

The elder Rosenbloom hired a porter to cart their trunks through the station’s rotunda to the exit, where, at the curb, they hired an open carriage. They moved through unpaved streets whose grit caught in their teeth and coated the front of their mourning clothes in granite residue. As they proceeded through the city’s crosscurrents of streets and avenues, Bloom watched his father’s grave profile flash in and out of darkened storefront windows, and when the density of the city center opened onto a series of empty squares whose fountains were dry, whose lawns were balding, Jacob said it would be some hours yet before they reached Mount Terminus.

In their new life, he told his son, they would live apart from the world at large. Apart from the assembly of men. Outside the reach of their influence. Beyond the boundaries of trivial concerns.

On the outskirts of town, they rode past small adobe homes shadowed by the lattices of oil derricks. Children scrambled around barrels and beds of tar, kicked up scythes of dust which drifted over the road and settled onto the browned backs of a chain gang hauling sledgehammers and casks of water. The hunched figures formed a slow procession behind a sheriff whose denim jacket and pant legs were embroidered with lightning bolts. Soon Bloom and his father passed no one at all. The coachman, a blue-eyed mestizo with pitted skin and a thick, crooked nose, tried to make conversation with Jacob, but the driver spoke little English and neither Bloom nor his father spoke any Spanish. The driver occasionally pointed to faraway places off the empty road, to the burned husk of a hacienda through the gates of a dead ranchero, and tried to explain an incident involving his cousin and his uncle and a woman who stepped between them, but the story was lost to the grind of the carriage’s wheels and the driver’s rapid flights into Spanish. No matter, he said with a shake of the head when the elder Rosenbloom apologized for not understanding. No matter.

They turned onto the mountain just as the glare of the sun had fallen to meet their eyes; they rode into the canyon’s shadows and switched back and forth over its trail’s rutted curves; the higher they scaled the grade, the more the vistas widened, the wider the ancient seabed expanded in diagonal rows of trees. They directed Bloom’s sight to the distant shore, to the north, where the folding range was mantled in bramble, olive and drab, for as far as he could see.

For as far as he could see, there was emptiness. No homes. No people. No vestiges of civilization past or present. When they reached a series of escalating plateaus stepping up to the mountain’s peak, they stopped at a blackened gate, beyond which was land so bright with color, in these barren wastes it seemed implausible it should exist. The father contrived a smile for the boy and told the driver to drive on; with a jolt, the horse kicked past the perimeter, up a long gravel path bisecting two garden mazes whose hedgerows were overgrown with tendrils of bougainvillea. The tall windbreak framed the front of the villa, its fading yellow walls, its thatched roof layered in terra-cotta. Overshadowing the roof’s ridges rose a tower, at its vertex a columned portico warmed by saffron light.

Upon noticing the day’s wane, Jacob told the driver to stop. He paid the man his fee and asked him to leave the trunks at the villa’s front door. Jacob then took hold of Bloom’s hand, and together, father and son walked along the edge of the garden maze to an empty field. Blond grass swept at the boy’s knees and the father’s shins all the way to the leveled acreage of the grove, where they were met by a sickly odor, of fruit moldering in heaps at the cephalopod roots of trees. Their sleeves covering their noses, they continued on to a long stand of eucalyptus, at which a hill descended to a large empty plot of land aswirl in dust; and here they turned onto the eroded earth at their property’s end, to the promontory pointing to the sea, less like a finger than the bow of a ship. The headland jutted out over a deep ravine, at whose precipice Jacob stood and stared into the bruised light of the setting sun, and with his eyes filled with its gloaming he seemed to be contemplating the oncoming darkness. For the time it took the spectrum of colors to submerge into the ocean’s depths, he said nothing; and when all that was left was some violet sediment on the horizon, the father touched his son’s cheek with his finger and said how very sorry he was for the fate that had befallen them. He wished he could revisit their past and amend it. For Bloom’s sake, he wished he were a different man.

Bloom looked to his father to better understand what had altered his mood; in the dim light, Jacob’s dark Semitic features were difficult to read, but the boy could see the elder Rosenbloom’s eyes were no longer cast toward the horizon; rather, they were fixed on a turn along the mountain road beyond the gorge; and when Bloom followed his father’s gaze he saw three silhouettes of men astride three horses.

What is it? asked the boy. What do you see?

Nothing, said his father. An illusion. A trick of the light. But the elder Rosenbloom’s voice sounded uncertain. He turned his head to Mount Terminus’s peak, and Bloom turned with him. Like a fog arriving from the sea, stars had already begun to cluster through the moonless sky, and upon seeing this, Jacob made Bloom promise that when he became a man and fell in love, he would protect his love better than Jacob had protected his.

*   *   *

The Rosenblooms were conceived somewhere on the other side of the world. In a country whose name they didn’t know. To mothers and fathers who were most likely dead. Those who told them about their origin could say with any certainty only that they had been carried by many caretakers to a port on the shore of the Adriatic Sea, where they were placed on a ship and into the arms of an old rabbi and his wife, who bundled Bloom’s father together with his mother and her twin sister in a bread basket. Each child, so far as the rabbi and his wife knew, had yet to be named. From the story of Joseph, the rabbi called the boy Jacob; the sisters, the rabbi’s wife called Rachel and Leah, and they passed down to each of them their family name. When the ship landed, the elderly couple claimed them as their grandchildren. To the gatekeeper, the old man swore on the scrolls of the Torah cradled in his arms that they had been borne by his two daughters, both of whom, he said, had died in childbirth. Because they were too old and poor to parent the children themselves, the rabbi and his wife carried Jacob, Rachel, and Leah to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum on the lower east end of the city, where they lived for many years.

*   *   *

The three infants had grown so accustomed to sleeping with one another over the course of their long journey, the two girls and the boy wouldn’t be separated at night without a great disturbance upsetting the nursery. Their new guardians allowed them to sleep together in the same crib until they were two, then moved them to the same bed until they were five, at which time they required them to reside in separate wings, but the children met every day between lessons to play in the courtyard, and without fail, they sat side by side when they dined. So Jacob wouldn’t be lonely at night, the girls cut pieces from the ribbons holding back the thick curls of their hair, and they pinned the shiny material to the lapel of his jacket, and each night before curfew they placed into his pockets notes inscribed with wishes he was meant to read before the dormitory lights were extinguished. The girls longed for things all children long for: sweets and toys and pets. They desired, too, things only orphans desire: a mother and a father, a room in which to sit alone, for silence lasting days and nights with no end. Jacob never made such wishes, as he had only one, of such great importance that he never dared write it down or articulate it.

His only wish was to remain with Rachel and Leah.

To never be apart from them.

To be reunited with them in his bed.

*   *   *

Anyone who had eyes could see in what ways the twins would blossom into great beauties. At the age of nine, they already comported themselves with the poise of young women, and on their own initiative they endeavored to refine their characters so they might better resemble the figures living in the novels they read at night under the glow of streetlamps hanging outside their dormitory windows. Leah taught herself to sing and play the spinet; Rachel taught herself how to draw and paint; their eyes, in turn, retained a hopeful glimmer, and projected an intellect neither sharp nor oppressive.

On Saturday afternoons, they walked with their sister orphans to the long meadow in the park, where, instead of running wild with the others, they presented themselves for public view at the edge of the promenade. There they watched the men and women of privilege stroll by, evaluated their faces as they passed, read into them what goodness they believed they were capable of. On one such Saturday, the identical sisters, dressed in their identical dresses, attracted the attention of an unaccompanied woman who, on her approach, saw them point her out of the crowd, then watched them lift a dandelion to their lips, and blow away the downy tuft in her direction.

What, the woman asked, had they wished for?

The girls said they had wished she would stop and talk with them.

Why? asked the woman.

And they told her why.

And what more would you wish for if I handed you all the dandelions in the world?

And they listed all the wishes they had written in the notes they had slipped into Jacob’s pockets. The following day, they were invited to visit the woman’s home. And off they went, and never returned. Without so much as a final note to wish Jacob well, they were gone, and would remain estranged from him for almost a dozen years.

*   *   *

To dull the loneliness Jacob felt in Rachel and Leah’s absence, he immersed himself in his studies, and he discovered one day in the Asylum’s library the writings of the Cambridge scryer, John Dee. He grew increasingly fascinated by Dee’s pursuit to devise a numeric code in which one could see the pure verities that underlay the visible world. He dreamed of a universe in which it was possible to prove there was a mystical unity in all creation, and marveled over the thought of an obsidian mirror that the old scholar acquired from a soldier who claimed Aztec priests had found within it the angels of God.

For two years, Jacob spent his free time absorbed by the principals of optics he’d discovered in Dee’s writings, in the drawings of Goethe, the treatises of Newton, and when his enthusiasm for this field was brought to the attention of one of the orphanage’s trustees, he was introduced to a man named Jonah Liebeskind, an inventor and craftsman, who made his living shaping lenses for cameras and naval telescopes. Mr. Liebeskind was a fastidious bachelor who saw the smallest imperfections in all things. In objects. In architecture. In the manners of men. In the appearance of women. His intention, he would one day explain to Jacob, was not to be unkind by pointing out the deficits in people and the objects they created, he simply could not tolerate mediocrity.

He said to Jacob the afternoon they met that if he was willing to work hard and do everything in his power to live up to his standards, if he was willing to pledge to him his diligence, and promise he would attempt to rise above his circumstances, he would make Jacob his apprentice.

To this, Jacob agreed.

In return, he was given a room of his own in Mr. Liebeskind’s splendid home, a key to the garden, a pair of coveralls to be worn in the machine shop, a new suit to be worn on days they made their deliveries, an additional suit, even more refined, to be worn to shul on the high holidays, to the theater, where they would spend each Sabbath eve, to the museum, where they would spend each Sabbath day studying art, and always to dinner.

Mr. Liebeskind was fond of saying, We will not be unseemly Jews. We will not look or speak like men spawned from the gutter. We will rise above. He settled for nothing less. Sartorial perfection. Clean hands. Buffed nails. Hair groomed. Shoes shined. Posture erect. Words pronounced without guttural inflection. Manners. Always manners. Always serving the aesthetics of grace. Jacob adopted Mr. Liebeskind’s regimen. A small sacrifice to make for a room of his own and for the opportunity to handle such beautiful tools. In a night and a day, the upright Mr. Liebeskind transformed him from an unkempt boy into a pristine little man, and in ten years’ time, all the while playing his role accordingly, Jacob absorbed everything Mr. Liebeskind imparted to him. He learned from him all there was to know about the properties of glass and shaping lenses, the mechanisms of photographic equipment, the physical nature of light, the internal workings of reflecting telescopes. His mentor had an impeccable eye for painting and believed there was no reason why he and Jacob, with a forthright application of ingenuity, couldn’t, one day, craft lenses and mechanisms that would make it possible for the photographers to whom they sold their equipment to be as great as Hals and Van Dyck. Tiepolo. Poussin. Guardi. He dreamed of traveling abroad like a proper gentleman, to meet with other opticians, to research their methods of shaping lenses, but they were always too consumed with work to take time for a holiday.

With Mr. Liebeskind’s permission, Jacob dissected the early projection and viewing devices his mentor had acquired over his lifetime; the components of his magic lanterns, the spinning carousel of his zoetropes, the synchronized disks of his phenakistoscope, the mandalas of his Wheel of Life; and with the little money he earned from Mr. Liebeskind, he bought materials with which he re-created, from designs he’d seen illustrated in the journal Phantasmagoria, an electrotachyscope and a phasmatrope. In this same journal, he read one night before bedtime an article about Thomas Edison’s search for a method by which he might deliver clear and consistent images on his Kinetoscope. Jacob visited the patent office to study the blueprints of Edison’s motion picture viewer, and saw in the drawings that the flaw wasn’t, as Edison claimed, with the width and length and tensile strength of the celluloid, or, for that matter, with the placement of perforations along the film’s edge, but rather with the rate at which each framed image moved past the device’s aperture. The instant Jacob looked at it, he saw the wondrous flaw, and in the instant that followed, its remedy occurred to him as if it were handed down from heaven by the angels of God the Aztec priests witnessed in Dee’s obsidian stone.

He spent the next year constituting Edison’s Kinetoscope, reengineering its system of feeds and loops, sprockets and pulleys, and when it was completed, he added to it a singular item, deceptively simple: a timing mechanism—not unlike what one might find inside a common pocket watch—that would make it possible to deliver however many frames of film per second one desired to the viewing piece of any motion picture device. In keeping with his character, the evening after he observed the successful operation of Jacob’s invention, Jonah Liebeskind—as if he had recognized at that moment that he was on the cusp of declining into the middling state of mediocrity he so abhorred—died peacefully in his sleep, leaving not the slightest indication on his face that he’d struggled to stay alive.

To Jacob, who had proved himself over the years a devoted acolyte, Mr. Liebeskind willed his splendid home, his machine shop, his tools, his collection of optical devices, and the type of small fortune a fastidious bachelor accumulates after so many years of hard work without holidays. And once again, Jacob found himself alone, without friends or companions, better off only in riches.

With a small portion of the money left to him by his mentor, Jacob bought a suit more refined than the suit he wore to shul on the high holidays, and, dressed in this new ensemble, he traveled to West Orange to see Edison, who, after studying the patent for Jacob’s timing mechanism, had agreed to sit for a demonstration. When presenting his invention to the great man, Jacob said, See, sir, see how simple and elegant. And he showed how simply and elegantly his invention rotated the device’s shutter as it intermittently halted and reengaged the scrolling film, how it left just the right length of slack for the sprockets of Edison’s Kinetoscope to move the frames of celluloid past the aperture, to create for the eye fluid imagery. And at this sight, Edison remarked, Now, why hadn’t I thought of that?

Jacob sold Edison the rights to use what he would come to call the Rosenbloom Drive for a modest royalty, and he reserved the privilege of being the sole manufacturer and distributor of the mechanism. Jacob’s modest riches wouldn’t yet accrue into a fortune, but they would soon thereafter, when, several years later, a former associate of Mr. Edison’s, a Mr. W.K.L. Dickson, who had been impressed by the young Rosenbloom’s ingenuity, sought Jacob out in his deceased mentor’s machine shop, and presented to him a new challenge: to build a mechanical system that would allow a projection device to cast a life-size image of a continuous action of prolonged duration. At present, because of the fussy internal configuration and limited capacity of Edison’s Kinetoscope, only the shortest of moving pictures could be observed—of the most minuscule physical gestures, of the most meager displays of human nature—and they could only be seen by stooping over a box and squinting into a hole. Mr. Dickson placed in Jacob’s hands a design for an apparatus he called a Phantoscope, and Jacob, again, after a short period of study, saw—as if God had breathed the solution into his mind—what Mr. Dickson and his colleagues could not. He set forth his terms—a greater royalty than the one he asked of Edison and the right to be the sole manufacturer of whatever moving parts he invented—and Mr. Dickson agreed.

In a few months’ time, Jacob built for him a mechanism more complex, but equally as elegant as the one he had built for Edison: a labyrinth of rolling roundabouts and reversals, metallic passages, clips and levers, all of which fed and guided a length of film on a wayward journey from one magazine up top to another below, with each frame of film stopping intermittently in front of the projector’s condenser lens and light source. This device he named the Rosenbloom Loop, which included in its design the Rosenbloom Drive. When Mr. Dickson saw in what an ingenious manner Jacob had made it possible to roll over as many feet of film that could be scrolled into the two magazines, and that the images they produced were larger than life, Dickson, who was not nearly as arrogant or prideful a man as Edison, said, Now, I would have never thought of that.

At which time, Jacob’s modest riches began to transform into lasting wealth.

*   *   *

In Jonah Liebeskind’s former machine shop, Jacob manufactured his mechanisms, and continued to attend to Mr. Liebeskind’s longstanding clients. And as the old man’s regimen had served him well thus far, he continued it on his own. He dressed in coveralls when working in the machine shop; when making deliveries, he dressed in his delivery suit; for dinner he dressed in his finest attire. On Friday nights after Sabbath prayers, he sat for a theater performance, sometimes two; on Saturdays he perused the wings of the museum. For many years he kept to these routines, and in doing so began to inhabit the character of his deceased mentor. More and more he resembled the fastidious bachelor whose work left him no time for holidays. And then, one Sabbath afternoon, a dozen years after he had watched Rachel and Leah slip away through the narrow opening of the Asylum’s doors, an event he had long ago stopped hoping for befell him. On a bench in the museum, a sketch pad on her lap, a nub of charcoal in her hand, Rachel sat, drawing, re-creating in her own style Tiepolo’s The Rest on the Flight into Egypt. There she was, the same little girl, now grown into the woman she had once pretended to be.

Jacob watched for a long while, well aware as he observed her in what ways he had become a man she wouldn’t recognize, so precise and regimented, tailored and mannered, manicured, as upright as a soldier. For so long now, the boy she was familiar with had long since vacated his body. Even if he wanted to, he knew he wouldn’t be able to summon him back. He rounded the stone bench on which she sat and continued to stare at her. He regarded with wonderment the movement of her hand and the shape of her lines, the curve of her wrist, and as soon as he formed her name on his lips, tears welled in his eyes. He thought for a moment that he should walk on and hide his face, but she sensed his presence and turned to see him crying in the silent manner he sometimes cried as a child, and upon seeing him this way, she recognized him.

Jacob? she said. Is it you? Is it really you?

That she knew his face without a moment’s hesitation left him unable to speak.

My dear, dear, Jacob, she said. It’s Rachel.

Yes, I know, he said. Of course, I know. How could I not?

And now, her eyes, too, filled with tears. They fell from the soft bulb of her chin and ran rivulets through the pitch, down the arm of the virgin mother, over the lines forming the newborn’s head. He sat beside her and took her hand, and for a long time they remained there, silent, expressing their awe with searching looks, looking at each other with immense curiosity, imagining in their recollection of each other how they must have appeared in the intervening years. After a long while, she expressed her regret for not having said goodbye to him the day they departed the orphanage. She said how often she’d thought of Jacob, described in what ways she continued to feel his absence as if he were a phantom limb. She told him she had returned to the Asylum after she and Leah had settled into their new lives. She had hoped to find him there, but he had already moved on, and, she thought, perhaps he was angry with her for having been so selfish and unfeeling, angry enough to have irreversibly broken the bond they shared. That she sat beside him now, Jacob told her, was all that mattered. And they continued to study each other until she no longer saw the boy she once knew and began to apprehend what he had become. Touching the corners of his eyes with her charcoaled fingers, she said, Look at you. So young, yet so old. She could intuit how alone he had been. She could see in the lines that had begun to prematurely form on his face at what an unnatural rate he had grown into a man, and she promised him in that instant, We will never be apart again.

*   *   *

Every Saturday, they met at the bench set before Tiepolo’s painting, and every Saturday, Jacob asked why Leah hadn’t come to see him, and every Saturday, Rachel made excuses for her sister, until she could make no more. Leah, she confessed, hadn’t visited him not because she didn’t have the desire to see him, but because she was unaware she and Jacob had been reunited. Rachel, in short, had no way of telling her, as it had been some years since she had been estranged from her sister. This Jacob couldn’t begin to comprehend. It was incomprehensible to Rachel as well, but it was the truth. Jacob asked how such a thing was possible. And Rachel described the ways in which their adopted mother, Alexandra Reuben, had deliberately and maliciously undermined Rachel and Leah’s devotion to each other. From the moment they moved into their new home, Alexandra favored Rachel; she appealed to her better self; enticed her with gifts and rewards, with love and affection. When Rachel conducted herself well in company or performed well at school, when she met her potential, her mother praised her and held her up as exemplary. Leah, on the other hand, could do nothing to satisfy her. No matter how much effort Leah put into her music, her appearance, the manners with which she conducted herself, Alexandra voiced displeasure. Disheartening displeasure. No matter how well her sister played or sang at her recitals, Alexandra escorted her through the reception hall with her arm entwined in hers and in the most anodyne tones made apologies to her friends for her daughter’s inferiority. If Leah expressed an opinion in company about a book she had enjoyed or about a fashion she found appealing, Alexandra twisted her words and revised her sentiments to make them sound foolish and uninformed. Once their adopted mother had successfully undermined Leah’s confidence, she began to appeal to her baser instincts; she imparted to her dark secrets and gossip about the men and women who visited their home; and when she did so, she expressed, on the one hand, her disgust with the improprieties perpetrated by members of their closed circle, while, on the other hand, she whispered her tacit approval. About a young woman traveling unescorted by a man of standing, or about a mistress engaged in an affair with a married man, she might say: They should feel the blackest shame choke at them in the darkest hour of the night. Of course, she would say in the same breath, One must consider, how does a young woman not unlike yourself, Leah, rise above her lowly position?

It wasn’t enough for Alexandra to merely encourage Leah to commit her own acts of transgression, she went so far as to manufacture them for her, by whispering, in the strictest confidence to her fellow matrons, lies about her own daughter’s exploits with strange men. Rachel and Leah dismissed their mother’s cruel and unscrupulous behavior as that of an unhappy woman too long alone and uncared for. They tried to take pity on her, but as time passed, as the sisters’ obscurity fell into relief and became more and more a distant memory, Leah’s resolve to deflect her mother’s fictions weakened, and she began to believe in and embody the character Alexandra invented for her. Taboo began to fascinate her. She began to imagine, to speak of ways in which she could challenge the limits of propriety, and soon thereafter she started to embrace her mother’s vision of her. While Rachel studied or painted, Leah dressed provocatively for evenings out with young men; she returned late in the evening. When this didn’t provoke the desired reaction, she extended her stay out until the early morning. When Alexandra continued to show her indifference, Leah didn’t return for days at a time; and then, not long after she turned sixteen, she fulfilled her mother’s expectations of her, and didn’t return at all. Rachel lost her sister to the city streets. Her own image of herself, the sound and smell of herself, her own flesh, disappeared into the shadows; the most intimate and integral part of her had become estranged. And this absence weighed upon her, she told Jacob, expressing itself in darker and darker visions of the world.

*   *   *

Jacob promised Rachel he would find Leah, and when he did, he would set things right and care for them both. Rachel’s shame, however, was too great to immediately agree to this course of action. She feared facing Leah again. She was unaware of it at the time, but was now convinced she had played a part in alienating her sister from the small, precious world they had entered together. She could have spoken her mind, but chose not to. She could have defied Alexandra, but didn’t. She could have fought more obstinately against her self-interest, but she didn’t want to lose her favored position in her mother’s heart, or, for that matter, put at risk the comforts of her mother’s home. It was evident to her now in hindsight, the many ways she had betrayed her sister. She had spent a great deal of time trying to imagine the life Leah had been leading, and she wasn’t convinced she wanted to become acquainted with its details. If I were Leah, she said to Jacob, I would be unforgiving, perhaps even vengeful.

Despite Rachel’s reservations, Jacob felt obligated to discover what had become of Leah. He had the means to look after her, and, if she were willing, he intended to extend his hand. On the bench in the museum, he and Rachel had fallen in love. He wanted to marry her, and she wanted to marry him, and Jacob, who for so many years had missed both sisters equally, couldn’t imagine a wedding without Leah. Wouldn’t she feel greater shame, he asked Rachel, if they didn’t search for her, to tell her of their plans, to have her present on the day they were joined? If they didn’t make the effort to search her out, wouldn’t it then be impossible to reconcile with her? To this, Rachel reluctantly agreed. Jacob hired an investigator, who instructed them some weeks later to visit the Freed Music Hall and take in an evening performance. On a Friday night, they sat together at the foot of the orchestra, and from there watched descend from the rafters on the seat of a swing whose ropes were twined in vines, Leah, singing the role of the ingénue, Eloise, a sylph whose songs were composed with melodies sweet and light, with lyrics laden with double meanings that left the gruffest men in the audience rapt with celestial and indelicate thoughts of streams and meadows, and Eloise, as she had been billed: dressed in white linen, her red lips spread in a girlish smile, golden locks curled over the nape of her neck, her bust bulging forth against the constraint of a corset, her pink fingers pulling up a silken slip to her naked thigh.

The reunion that evening was more pleasant than Jacob and Rachel anticipated. It appeared all of Rachel’s fears were unfounded. Leah warmly embraced her. She shed tears over the time lost between them, but over a meal in a nearby tavern, she insisted she had no regrets. She assured them she was content. In fact, she couldn’t have been more enthusiastic when speaking of the life she had chosen for herself. She had traveled to many cities, performed before a great number of audiences. Foolish men regularly sent expensive gifts to her dressing room, and Samuel Freed, for whom the hall was named, paid her a salary that afforded her a fine suite in a hotel not very far from the park’s promenade, where she and Rachel had stood so many times as young girls. She had missed Rachel, she said, but she couldn’t bear to complicate the fragile world Rachel occupied with Alexandra, so she decided when she left home to spare Rachel any trouble she might cause her. She was confident they would be together again, when the time was right.

Upon hearing of Leah’s success and happiness, Jacob could see in Rachel’s face how greatly relieved she was. She embraced her sister again and told her of their plans, and when Leah heard the news, the two sisters embraced a third time, and Leah said how wonderful and appropriate it was that she and Jacob should once again fall into each other’s company by happenstance. Like Rachel, she expressed her profound regrets for having abandoned Jacob in the manner they did, and told him how often she had thought of her beloved companion over the years. Let us all forgive one another, shall we? she said. Let’s say we’ll let the past lie in ruins. In the months leading up to the wedding, Leah was consistently in good spirits and full of good cheer, whether she sat with Rachel in Jacob’s home for dinner or was out with Rachel, making preparations for the reception. She graciously arranged with Samuel Freed to hire musicians from the hall and introduced Rachel to the florist who arranged the flowers in its lobby. Leah went so far as to sit beside Alexandra in grudging silence on the day the young couple stood under the chuppah to exchange their vows. All, it seemed, was reconstituted. All, it seemed, was how it should have been.

*   *   *

The newlyweds spent their wedding night in a hotel in the city and the following day rode a steamer upriver into the countryside, where they stayed at an inn on the edge of a lake. For several weeks they honeymooned, and it was there, on a walk up a hill overlooking the lake, they discovered the Woodhaven home in which they would live. Leah helped Rachel pack the items she would take with her from Alexandra’s home, and sent stagehands to assist Jacob in dismantling Mr. Liebeskind’s machine shop, to relocate it upriver. On the day the boxes were unloaded, Jacob was called away to the city on business. He would be gone for only three days, but he wanted Rachel to join him. He didn’t want to be away from her for a moment, but she insisted she remain behind to unpack. Jacob traveled by train from Woodhaven and was ferried across the river to the naval yard, where he spent the afternoon installing a research telescope in the captain’s quarters of the U.S.S. Maine. The following day, he did the same, and that night he returned to Mr. Liebeskind’s home to find Rachel had changed her mind. She had decided to join him after all. They dined out together, then went to bed, and because they had nowhere to be, they stayed wrapped in each other’s limbs for the better part of the following day and night. The next morning when they awoke, Rachel packed their bags and on they went to the train. All this time, at the station, inside the carriage on their journey home, they held each other close, and when they reached the threshold of their new house, Jacob playfully lifted up his new bride in his arms and carried her inside, only to find standing there Rachel, who looked at Leah in Jacob’s arms.

There was her sister, dressed in her clothes, her hair mussed, her face flushed. All Rachel could say was that she didn’t understand. To which, Leah said, Look at me. Look at me and tell me you don’t know my reasons. Jacob set Leah down and, as the two sisters stood before each other in a frozen moment in time, he looked from Leah to Rachel and back again to Leah, and for the life of him, he couldn’t tell them apart. All he could do was look away as Rachel listened to her sister unburden herself of the great unhappiness and hardship she had endured since she was driven out of Alexandra’s home. There was no great success. She had no suite by the park. She was, more or less, kept by Samuel Freed in a small room inside the music hall, where he took from her whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. For years, this had been their arrangement. For years, she had been his favored girl. This was the sacrifice she had made to escape the cruel woman who raised them. Now do you understand? she asked Rachel. Do you not understand why I want you to endure the lasting discomfort of this moment? Rachel was too hurt and dumbfounded to speak. Leah removed a slim paper tube from her pocket, marked Jacob’s cheek with a streak of red lipstick, and made her exit. When Rachel found her voice, all she could say to Jacob was, How could you not know it wasn’t me? How could you not know it was her? Jacob had no answer and, as he rubbed away the stain on his face, he was left to wonder if, perhaps, he had known. But how could he?… Yet how could he not?

*   *   *

For many months, Jacob and Rachel lived as if they were in mourning. Rachel covered all the mirrors in black cloth so she wouldn’t be reminded of Leah. She ordered Jacob to the springs near their home, where she insisted he be ritually cleansed in the presence of a rabbi. She fasted and prayed, and, in the company of the rabbi’s wife, she, too, visited the springs to immerse her body and cleanse her spirit in the living waters. Only after these rituals and further months of reflection was she prepared to once again accept her husband. Not long after she had managed to achieve some semblance of inner harmony, however, Rachel received from Leah a birth announcement and a photograph of Simon Abraham Reuben, a child whose face resembled Jacob’s, and all she had worked to forget was now undone. She fell into a dark state of melancholy, refused to eat or get out of bed. For weeks she barely uttered a word. One morning Jacob awoke, in the room to which his wife had long since banished him, to find Rachel wasn’t in the house. He searched for her everywhere, and eventually discovered at the train station that she had departed for the city early that morning. Jacob, instinctively knowing where to go, went directly to the music hall, where he learned from a stagehand that Rachel had been there and moved on. The stagehand had sent her to Samuel Freed’s residence, and there, too, Jacob went, and when he arrived, he walked into the entryway, where, to his horror, he saw Samuel Freed sitting at the bottom of a stairwell, weeping over an unmoving Leah, whose dead body was still thick from pregnancy. Samuel Freed looked at Jacob and described to him in what raving manner Rachel had barged in. She ran upstairs, lifted Leah’s child out of its crib, and, claiming the boy was rightfully hers, started walking out with it. Leah chased after her. When she reached for the baby, Rachel stepped out of the way and Leah tumbled down the stairs. She has the child, Samuel told Jacob. You’ll find her, and the boy, and you’ll bring him back to me. Do this, and I’ll show you mercy. Don’t do it, and I swear to you, Rosenbloom, I will see you and your wife destroyed.

All Jacob could think to do was return home to Woodhaven and wait. When three days passed, he began to think the worst. The evening of the third night, however, a carriage pulled into the drive, and out of it Rachel emerged with the bundled infant. His wife’s demeanor wasn’t her own. She glowed with the pride of a new mother, made faces at the babe in her arms, acted as if she, herself, had given birth to it. Jacob went outside and asked the driver to wait a moment. Without disturbing Rachel’s fragile state of mind, he escorted her inside and laid her and his son down to rest. When he returned to the cabbie he asked if he would take a message to the telegraph office. He scribbled a note addressed to Mr. Freed, telling him if he wanted the boy he would have to come and collect him. And back inside he went and sat with his wife and Simon until morning. Mr. Freed arrived with his men and a nurse at dawn, and while Rachel slept, Jacob pulled Simon from her arms, walked him outside, and handed him to the woman.

When you next see him, said Freed, he will be a man. He will know who you are. He will know what you’ve done. He will know what she has done. And he will come to claim what’s his. Until then, you and she will not go near him. Is that understood?

Jacob understood.

Until then, your wife will not be safe from me.

Jacob understood.

Freed motioned his arm at the men who had traveled with him to Jacob and Rachel’s home. You’ll be visited by these men from time to time, and when they come to you, you will give them whatever they ask for. Anything.

Yes, said Jacob. Anything.

If you become disagreeable, said Freed, you see the nurse? I will send her to the police. She will tell them, in no uncertain terms, that your lovely wife is a murderess. Say you understand.

I understand, said Jacob.

I have never been an ideal man for any woman, Rosenbloom. I might not have always treated Leah as I should have, but, whatever my faults, whatever passed between us, I adored that woman more than you can possibly imagine. I was prepared to give her whatever her heart desired.

I am sorry for you, said Jacob. I’m sorry for it all.

Well, Freed said, I am glad we have an understanding.

When Rachel awoke, Jacob told her what he had done. More important, he told her what she had done. Leah is dead, he said. A statement Rachel refused to believe. Leah is dead, he said. Again and again he said it, for him to hear as much as for her. He must have said it to her a hundred times, and not even then would she believe him. He could hardly believe it himself. Not until she read in the paper that Leah Reuben, who played Eloise at the Freed Music Hall, had died under suspicious circumstances, did Rachel accept Leah was gone, at which point she fell into an inconsolable bereavement.

*   *   *

The triumvirate sometimes appeared in the distance. In dark gaps on the road. In shadows across the canyons. As phantasms standing atop vistas high up on the trails. They were there. And then they were gone. Never present long enough for Bloom to see their forms clarified. When the days began to shorten, the young Rosenbloom longed to feel the harvest chill break the summer heat. He yearned to feel the mornings’ moisture soak into his shoes, to smell the redolence of decaying wood, to see beds of moss thicken over hardened earth. But the autumnal heat intensified instead of diminished, and the more the moisture evaporated from the soil and radiated in waves across the basin, the more he pined for Woodhaven. Soon, desert gales arrived to further petrify the brush blanketing the vistas, and not long after, somewhere on the uninhabited range, plumes of amber smoke breasted the sky; the air filled with a sulfurous stink, and down snowed stinging flakes of ash. It would be many months after the winds arrived and the fires had exhausted themselves before they would feel the relief of winter rains. Torrential bursts washed away precipices and turned Mount Terminus’s canyons into muddy rivers. When spring arrived, and then summer, Bloom wouldn’t have been able to differentiate one season from the other were it not for the fact that as the Earth’s vernal orbit concluded, the spindling limbs of the eucalyptus trees appeared too tired to hold up the clusters of their leathery leaves. It would be many years before he would grow accustomed to the bright skies circumscribing the passage of time; to the eruption of wildfires and flash floods, the violent quakes of the Earth; but he would never feel at ease with the effect their new surroundings had on his father. Jacob’s spirit had discernibly dusted over, not unlike the preponderance of terrain about their new home. Only on the rarest occasions, when, perhaps, a stellar phenomenon presented itself in the sky, or if, by chance, the elder Rosenbloom was stirred by a passage of poetry or philosophy, did Bloom perceive the enthusiasm Jacob once enjoyed when discussing a small scientific truth or a metaphysical curiosity. He had never been a demonstrative man, but neither had his eyes ever appeared as dull and inert as they did now. Jacob regularly muddled away the diurnal hours inside the labyrinths of the front gardens, where, shortly after their arrival, he cut back the heliotrope blooms and the clinging appendages of the bougainvillea, edged hedgerows, planted beds of geraniums, crowns of thorn. When he had tidied the gardens’ extremities, he began sculpting topiary from shrubs long unattended. With a stubborn devotion, he pruned from verdant protozoa, legs and torsos, arms and heads, and when, over the period of their first year on Mount Terminus, he had refined their curves and given shape to their faces, their hair, their hips, the figures transformed into women; into the same woman; in variegated poses, they stood mirroring one another in their respective corners and corridors, each figure expressing in her own distinct manner a profound disenchantment. Through the tall hedges Jacob cut ovals slightly wider in dimension than the faces, so each set of leafy eyes looked off in the direction of the villa, onto the mountain’s range, out to the haze blanketing the sea, to the canyon’s crags, to the promontory on which Bloom and his father continued to meet at day’s end. The elder Rosenbloom constantly and fastidiously trimmed back his anthropomorphic shrubs, and, as he did so, he talked with them lovingly and intimately, in conspiratorial whispers about a past he would keep secret from his son for some years to come.

*   *   *

Left to his own devices, the innocent Bloom walked the trails to Mount Terminus’s peak, where, facing the eastward expanse of the valley, he read and sketched and carried on lengthy conversations with himself. In the evenings, while the elder Rosenbloom sat in his study, reading ledgers and writing correspondence to an associate he’d charged with the responsibility of attending to the business he had abandoned, Bloom went from room to room, lighting sconces, illuminating the villa’s coffered ceilings, the colorful mosaics of its floor tile, the spiderwebs of fissures expanding through its walls. Their furnishings had been shipped from Woodhaven and set in place by his father throughout the villa’s corresponding chambers. Bloom took comfort living among the many familiar items. The piano in the parlor. The armchair in which the elder Rosenbloom reclined in the later evening with a bottle of schnapps, with his fellow lens grinder Baruch Spinoza, with his beloved scryer, John Dee. Their dining room table and brocade chairs, the Georgian sideboard, the floral-rimmed china. Upstairs in a library even more spacious than the one in Woodhaven, his father’s collection of books and optical devices—his Indonesian shadow puppets, his magic lanterns and zoetropes, the synchronized disks of a phenakistoscope, the mandalas of a Wheel of Life—filled cupboards and shelves climbing to the heights of a telescopic ceiling. The elder Rosenbloom’s drafting table, at which he once sketched his optical designs, was present; present, too, were the leather sofas on which Bloom’s growing body left its impressions. In a room overlooking a courtyard bordered by two cottages were Bloom’s bed and night tables, a rolltop desk, Turkish rugs with opalescent borders, a wingback chair and a threadbare footstool erupting with fluff. Most comforting of all to him was the gallery in which Aphrodite reclined in relief above the mantelshelf of the fireplace. In this room, at the level of the goddess’s eyes, his father had hung the Woodhaven landscapes Bloom’s mother had painted, and under them arranged a chaise longue and two wooden chairs with clawed arms and clawed feet. One chair was slightly smaller than the other, and etched in Hebrew into the backside of the smaller one was the name of the boy’s mother, and into the larger one, the name of his father. Whenever Bloom asked about the sadness he had observed in his mother’s face in the days before her death, Jacob said to him, There is no need for you to dwell in darkness, my dear Bloom. When he asked about the fog consuming his mother’s paintings, he said the same. My dear Bloom, there is no need for you to dwell in darkness. It was this room Bloom often visited in the middle of the night when he had difficulty sleeping. He wrapped himself in his mother’s shawl and looked at her heavy brushwork, at Woodhaven as perceived through her studio window, its view of the lake, the placid cobalt water reflecting the slopes of the valley, the summits of its fern green hills bridged by gray mists. On the glare of the window’s glass shimmered a ghostly portrait of his mother’s profile, the elegant slope of her brow, her bold, aquiline nose, one of her otherworldly eyes whose gaze appeared to simultaneously stare onto the landscape below, and at him, her observer. While listening to the hum and groan of vapors expanding through the pipes behind the walls, while looking at the iridescent image of his mother, and breathing in what remained of her dying scent, Bloom was able to recall the days he spent in her company, copying images from her collection of lithographs. She would set before him the paintings of Tiepolo, The Prophet Isaiah, Rachel Hiding the Idols, Jacob’s Dream; Rembrandt’s Joseph Tells His Dream to Jacob; Gelder’s Judah and Joseph, and she would say, One day the sun and the moon will bow to you, my dear Bloom. Like his mother, she would tell him, he possessed a steady hand and enjoyed a strange talent for seeing shapes within shapes. Like her, she said, he needed only to look at an object once before he could retain all its aspects in his mind. On several occasions, Bloom overheard her say to his father, In his eyes, I can see the face of God; in the lines he draws, I can hear His voice; when I watch his hand move, I can sense His presence. To these assertions, Jacob said to her, Please, my love, please don’t. Please settle your mind. And he would take her by the hand and escort her to bed, or sit her before the fire in the parlor, where, wrapped in paisley, she stared into the blaze with a daemonic gaze. This memory of her still and quiet eyes filled with flames, and this memory alone, delivered Bloom into unshakable slumbers.

*   *   *

On the sixth day of Yamim Noraim, in the month of Tishri, on the third day before the sun descended onto Yom Kippur, one year and two months after their arrival, Bloom, now a boy of ten, gathered at Jacob’s request a collection of trimmings pruned from the garden topiary and bound them in twine. When he completed this task, he helped his father unearth two fledgling juniper trees. That morning Bloom gathered candles and lanterns, filled several jugs of water, packed loaves of bread and jam, dried fruit, salted meat, a sack of oats, a bunch of carrots. He rolled up blankets and pillows into a tarp, and retrieved from the library a miniature book titled Death, Forlorn, which he tucked into the pocket of his father’s jacket. When Jacob finished harnessing their mare to the buckboard, Bloom loaded the cargo he’d collected throughout the day. In the kitchen that evening, they ate a heavy stew, and when they were through, they set out into the darkest hour, the only lights the lanterns hanging from hooks on either side of their seats, a sliver of moon, the gauzy haze of the firmament. At sunrise, when the great valley brightened, Bloom noticed far behind them a dark fleck on the horizon; as they rode northeast in the direction of Mojave, he watched it trail after them, but just as every time he felt the presence of the men he had seen at the station, he wasn’t certain they were, in fact, there.

At the pace of a funeral march, they traveled the valley’s entire expanse, and when they reached the range beyond Mount Terminus, they entered a canyon pass. It deposited them onto a desolate plain, onto a hard, grooved road that delivered them to a region of cultivated earth abutting the desert’s edge. For two days Jacob had gone without sleep or food, and each time Bloom insisted he stop and take some nourishment and close his eyes, his father refused. He would only break for an hour every now and again to rest the mare, during which time he looked through a spyglass in the direction from which they had ridden. Bloom asked him what he saw, and his father said, Men on horseback. Riding this way. Bloom asked who they were, and his father said, They are men. On horseback. Nothing more.

They soon met the embankment of a river and turned in the direction of the current. For several hours they followed it to the shores of a lake taking on the shape of the rift valley in which the river’s water had settled, and when they arrived there, father and son made camp. Bloom gathered brush to build a fire while Jacob arranged, before the lapping water of the shore, the candles and the lanterns, the trimmings and the trees. When the boy returned, Jacob told him to stand beside him, and after a few moments of silence, the elder Rosenbloom lit the yahrzeit candle with a match and slipped it under the fogged glass of a lantern, and recited, God full of mercy who dwells on high, grant perfect rest on the wings of your divine presence among the holy and the pure who shine in the brightness of the heavens to the soul of who has gone to her eternal rest as all her family pray for the elevation of her soul. Her resting place shall be in the Garden of Eden. The master of mercy will care for her under the protection of His wings for all time and bind her soul in the bond of everlasting life. God is her inheritance and she will rest in peace. When the elder Rosenbloom finished the kaddish, Bloom watched his father untie the bundles of trimmings, and with the clippings piled on either side of his feet, he bent down and picked one up, rose, and cast it onto the water. He bent, he rose, davening, and with each offering, said, Forgive me. Please, my love, please forgive me. Forgive me, please forgive me. Forgive me, he said, please, my love, forgive me.

And when he had begged for his wife’s forgiveness more times than Bloom could bear to hear, when the trimmings seemed to cover the vast surface of the lake, the sun started its descent behind the range. His father gathered some rocks, and with the brush Bloom had collected, he started a fire to keep Bloom warm and told him to eat the bread and meat, to drink some water. He told him he would be watching over him through the night and throughout the following day.

But where are you going? asked Bloom.

His father told him he would see soon enough. Don’t wander off, he said. And don’t follow me. He handed Bloom his spyglass, then lifted the juniper saplings in his arms, and through the eyepiece of the small telescope, Bloom watched him climb.

The elder Rosenbloom climbed high up the escarpment above the lake, and there, under the gnarled limbs of mature trees of the same variety he carried, Bloom could see him dig into the rocky earth with his spade. He watched him submerge the trees into their holes, cover over their roots, and sprinkle them with water, at which time Bloom could see no more, as his father’s figure and his trees were soon shrouded in darkness. For the entirety of the night his father didn’t return, for the entirety of the night the blue flame of the yahrzeit candle burned, and when the sun rose in the morning, Bloom discovered him sitting between the fledgling trees, and he discovered, too, high up the escarpment on the opposite side of the lake, three dark figures standing tall under the shade of a boulder. For the entirety of the following morning, Bloom sat between them and his father without moving. For the entirety of that afternoon, the men stood under cover of the overhang, watching Jacob. For the entirety of the afternoon, Jacob sat under buzzards perched in heraldic poses.

The birds, unmoving and silent, clutched at pale blue berries with their talons, Jacob’s only cover the shadows cast from their outstretched wings. In the desert heat, Bloom watched his father fast and pray, and stare beyond the grand deposit of lake water, up the mouth of the river, whose bounty Bloom could see evidenced through his scope by the meandering lines cut through the plains, in the oblong curves etched into the earth from its overflow, in the argent veins of irrigation canals running to plots growing high and green. He imagined his father fortifying his weakening body with images of ice melt flowing from the mountains beyond, with thoughts of the rushing cascade falling through the gorge of a volcanic crater. How else could he sustain himself if not by envisioning the way in which the waters fell down steep cliffs into the maw of jagged rock? He must have seen it streaming through canyons in his mind, rounding its tortuous route through the scrub and bramble, pooling into the graben over which he sat. Over the water, onto the expanse of the panorama, Jacob stared for the entirety of the day. Not until the arc of the sun once again kissed the summit of the distant range did he lift his weary body and begin his descent down the trail he’d yesterday negotiated upward.

When the elder Rosenbloom returned to the campsite, he asked Bloom if he wouldn’t mind packing up. Bloom did as his father requested. He rolled up his bedding into his tarp, and collected and stored the lanterns. Jacob, meanwhile, watered and fed the mare, and drank some water and ate some food himself, and when Bloom had finished his task, Jacob climbed into his seat and took hold of the reins; and when Bloom joined him, he said, Father?

Yes, my dear?

Did you see them?

Did I see who?

The men. Up there, he said, pointing, sitting opposite you.

Yes, I saw them.

Who are they?

They are men.

What sort of men?

Men whose interests happen to coincide with ours for the time being. Nothing more.

Bloom looked up to where the three dark figures had been biding their time, and he asked his father what those interests were. Jacob said they were none of Bloom’s concern. It is not for you to worry about, he said. The worry is mine, and mine alone. They are only men, he repeated for Bloom. They will do us no harm. This I promise you.

*   *   *

Some weeks later over breakfast, Jacob said to Bloom, You are lonely, my dear.

To this Bloom said, No, father. We, together, are all that I need.

The following day, the elder Rosenbloom traveled to Mission Santa Theresa de Avila, and hired from its refectory two sisters to be their cook and maid. Before they arrived, Jacob told his son he was never to say a cross word to their new cook. For a young woman of twenty-three, she had been through an ordeal a boy wouldn’t understand, and he expected Bloom to treat her with the kindness of a pure heart even when he didn’t feel like being kind.

The young woman Jacob referred to was Meralda, the elder sister, the larger and heartier of the two, the one more worn around the eyes. She possessed plump ankles and wrists, and had fingers like overstuffed sausages, which, in the first days she took up residence on the estate, she used to knead the boy’s cheeks as she kneaded the dough she flattened into tortillas and shaped into loaves of bread. She would then stop and hold him firmly in her grip for a few moments, at which point a doleful expression overcame the corners of her mouth; her eyes moistened, and in that instant, Bloom found his nose buried in the smell of flour powdered about the heft of her breast. Any motherless child would have been fortunate to be embraced so tenderly. However, Bloom concluded, from the way Meralda would release him to gaze out through the kitchen’s open shutters onto the sky, that her affection was meant for some boy other than him. To the sound of wood burning in the stove, to its crack and hiss, he watched her disappear into memory, and he, whose boyish frame prompted this reverie, became invisible to her.

Bloom was better disposed toward spending his time in the dim presence of Roya, who had been born into a chrysalis of silence almost four years to the day before he entered the world. Deaf and mute, she wandered with a somnambulist’s gait from room to room without acknowledging Bloom was there observing her. Unlike Meralda, whose fleshy features readily displayed her most internal thoughts and feelings, Roya’s youthful lineaments were more delicate and narrow and remained fixed in beatific remove. They hardly ever changed, and if they did, the changes were so subtle, Bloom could never be certain if what he saw wasn’t an invention of his imagination. Each morning after breakfast, he trailed after her to watch her sweep aimlessly at surfaces with the bright green plumage of her feather duster. And when she had tucked away the corners of their beds, and had pressed and hung the elder Rosenbloom’s shirts, she broke from her chores and sat in the courtyard with her feet submerged in the reflecting pool. Bloom would sit beside her, and together they would stare down at the ripples of water moving through the reflection of a crescent-shaped building terraced onto the shelf of a short, crescent-shaped mesa. Sometime, long ago, his father had told him, this dwelling had burned from within, and was now derelict and forbidden. For this reason, its shutters had been nailed tight, and its door fixed with a sturdy lock, its only dwellers brown lizards warting its stucco walls.

It was at the edge of the reflecting pool, some months after the sisters’ arrival, that Roya presented to Bloom an object that would connect him to a part of his past about which he wouldn’t have otherwise known. From a pocket in her skirt, she removed a folded piece of paper whose seams were thin and worn, then pulled at the corners one by one to reveal an ink drawing crafted with heavy lines Bloom recognized to be his mother’s. It was a portrait of his father standing in the shadows of Mount Terminus’s gate, looking very much as he appeared at present: drawn and longing and mournful. Bloom stared at the image for a time, trying to divine from the dark warrens composing his father’s expression how this was possible.

Where did you find this? he asked Roya.

In the same manner with which she had presented the drawing to him, she folded it into a square and placed it back in her pocket. He expected this would be the extent to which she would answer a question she couldn’t hear, but after she had dried her feet with the hem of her skirt and had pinched her toes into her shoes, she tugged on the collar of Bloom’s shirt and began walking toward the house. He trailed behind her through the arcing shadows of the courtyard’s loggia and followed her inside, up the stairs, along the landing. They passed Jacob’s bedroom, and Bloom’s, then entered the gallery, where Roya approached one of Rachel’s paintings; one at whose vanishing point was a church on a hilltop, nearly all of it lost in a heavy mist, all for a muted yellow glow emanating from a window in its spire. She pulled away from the wall the bottom of its frame, retrieved the piece of paper from her pocket, and slipped it into a worn crevice between the canvas and the wooden slat. And then, as if nothing unusual at all had transpired, Roya went about her duties as if Bloom wasn’t there.

Over dinner that evening, when Bloom set his mother’s drawing down at the head of the table, his father, who wore the same expression as the one in the picture, nodded at the image—as if to say he already knew of its existence and knew where Bloom had found it. He then folded it over along its worn seams and slipped it into the inner pocket of his dinner jacket.

For a long time Jacob stared into steam rising up from a tureen of broth fogging the lusters of the dining room’s chandelier, and, after this period of contemplation, he turned to his son and said with a thin smile all he was going to say. He said, It was a very long time ago.

Bloom wanted to know if the time in the past spent on Mount Terminus with his mother was a time like now, one filled with sorrow. But his father, anticipating a question, said, I will tell you more when you’ve become a man. The boy wasn’t aware of what his face revealed, but whatever he had shown of his interior, of his hunger to know more about his mother and his father, Jacob said: I promise, my dear, you will know everything you need to know when you have grown.

Bloom didn’t object. He knew his father’s resolve well. He knew it was a futile endeavor to extract from him what he wanted with childish emotion, so he said, Yes, Father, when I have grown.

*   *   *

Bloom began to imagine, when he reclined in the library, or walked the dusty trails, or sat with her likenesses in the gardens, his mother observing him from across the room, or from somewhere ahead in the distance, or while sitting at the opposite end of a bench. And when he sat with Roya at the edge of the reflecting pool, he would wonder aloud about what might have occurred in his mother and father’s life to have made them travel to the end of the world. Why, he asked more than once, would they willingly choose desolation? Bloom discovered on his nightstand, the morning after he had posed this question to Roya, a wooden cross with acorns engraved on the front and on the back a primitive figure of a whale. As soon as he dressed, he carried it to the garden, where he found his father standing on a ladder, narrowing the shape of his mother’s face where it had grown plump in the cheeks.

Have we become Christians? he asked as he lifted the cross.

His father stepped down and took it from him, examined it, and then handed it back, saying, No, my dear, we have not become Christians.

Then why did you leave this beside my bed?

To which Jacob said as he climbed back onto the ladder, I’ll have a talk with Meralda.

Bloom suspected it wouldn’t have been Meralda who had left the cross. Indeed, he was certain it would have been Roya. But because he wanted to protect her from any discomfort she might feel in his father’s presence, and because he hoped his silent companion would one day introduce him to something else belonging to his mother, he didn’t want to say as much. So he said nothing. And having said nothing, he began to believe in the causality between his omission and the great number of objects that appeared beside his bed. The morning after he found the cross, he discovered next to his pillow a Latin Bible, its pages oxidized brown and illustrated with images intended for the eyes of a child. Soon, artifacts fashioned in the same style as the cross began to appear; such things as clay pots and dolls carved from oak, a leather pouch filled with charms, talismans shaped from polished bone.

Each morning these objects appeared, and each evening after Bloom had fallen asleep, they were taken from his possession. He tried to remain awake into the early hours of the morning, after his father had quietly drunk himself into unconsciousness, when he could sneak out of his room and follow Roya to wherever it was she retrieved these items. Every night he went in search of her, it was as if she didn’t exist.

Everywhere he looked, in the many rooms and halls, in the maids’ quarters, in the outbuildings, she was never present. And so he would return to his bed and wait for her to arrive, but as if he had been put under a spell, his anticipation weakened; his eyes grew heavy, his small body fell into a deep pit of darkness, and when he awoke to the sun filling his room, there appeared a new curio. In several notes he left on his bedside table, he wrote, Where do you go at night to find these? But there was never a reply, only more and more objects left in exchange for his inquiries. He soon found colorful pictures printed from woodblocks, meticulous etchings whose compilation over time shaped for the boy a tragic tale.

The story began under dusty blue skies, where a tribe of Indians gathered at the mouth of the spring that now filled the estate’s cisterns and irrigated its land. There were no eucalyptus or orange trees, no avocado or olive trees, no rosebushes or manicured gardens, only a wilderness of oaks, into which Indian children climbed and shook from their limbs acorns into waiting baskets below. Under a bright canopy of stars, under a full moon, in the crepuscular glow of distant wildfire, the women ground acorn into meal. Before sunrise, the men departed for the sea, and returned to the fires in the afternoon, wearing lines of fish hung over their shoulders. All the tableaus from this time resembled an Eden, vignettes of a people free from adversity, until one day Franciscan priests led a serpentine trail of soldiers, armored and helmeted, strapped with muskets and swords and rapiers, to the heights of the mountain. They forced the tribe in its entirety to lie prostrate before the crosses mounted to their saddles, to witness them fell the oaks and cap the spring. When the trees had all fallen and the spring had ceased to flow, the eyes of the captive men and women collectively darkened. Their faces contorted, as if afflicted with palsy. The priests marched away the women and children to a glowing cross by the sea. Behind remained their men, who the soldiers felled as easily as they had felled the oaks. And in place of the spring water that had streamed down the mountainside ran the men’s blood. In the aftermath of the atrocity, the priests returned the women to the mountain, to make them handle at the point of swords the gruesome corpses of their husbands and brothers, fathers and sons, cousins and uncles. One after the next, they were appointed to drag their men into a ravine in which buzzards and coyotes tore away at their remains. The land afterward was cleared by oxen, the fallen trees stripped of their bark and cut for lumber that would be used in the construction of the villa, in which the women would live as servants, on whose property their daughters terraced the mountain for orange and lemon groves, where they could see to the east from the peak of Mount Terminus their sons raising swine in the valley below.

*   *   *

When this vision of Mount Terminus’s past reached its conclusion, Bloom’s nightstand in the morning was bare. Without the expectation he felt before he fell asleep and the excitement he experienced when he awoke, the ghostly visions of his mother, which had subsided in the intervening months, returned, and in her company he now could see in the lacunae of the estate’s grounds, could hear in the clattering leaves of the groves, in the upsurge of the running spring, the phantoms of Mount Terminus’s aborigines. Absent forethought, unaware of his intent, he began to draw scenes of the vivid chimera his imagination imposed on the estate. Not unlike the progression of events he had observed in the prints, he drew into the gardens and the groves life-affirming idylls. He set his mother in the company of children hanging from limbs of trees. She sat with women who ground acorn into meal. She presided over a feast held under a moonlit sky. And as he had witnessed his father do when he set out to perfect his topiary, the boy tended to these Arcadian hymns to his mother with the same fastidious and loving care. Bloom refined each line of each composition until the ink he pressed onto paper with a fountain pen resembled the heavy strokes of his mother’s brush; and only when he was satisfied that they reflected in their totality what he had envisaged, in the instance the phantasmagorias were born, did he present the drawings to his father, who, upon receiving the very first one, and upon receiving many more thereafter, appeared elevated in spirit.

With each presentation of his handiwork, Bloom could see color flush his father’s face. He took great pleasure watching him handle the paper’s edges before studying the complexities, looking on the figments of his imagination as if he might discover within the details of the drawings’ configurations a hidden map to free him from his present condition. Jacob sent the drawings to town with Meralda, to have them framed, and when they returned, he hung them in the parlor, on the cracked wall facing the chair in which he reclined at night to drink and smoke. Orderly rows formed, and by flickering gaslight, he stared at them, meditated over them, at times spoke to them under his breath.

Having witnessed the revival of his father’s spirit, Bloom grew determined to further animate it. He was convinced if he continued to provide him more and more of what he saw in the stillness of his days, the elder Rosenbloom would begin to live in the world. Bloom, therefore, withdrew from the activities that provided him solace. He withdrew from his books. He withdrew from taking his daily sojourns to Mount Terminus’s peak. Instead, in the estate’s quietest corners, sometimes with Roya, sometimes without, he dutifully daydreamed and drew what he saw in the shadows. He didn’t quite understand why, but the more absorbed his father became by his drawings, Bloom was visited again and again by the image of the serpentine trail formed by the missionaries and their soldiers. Again and again, he envisioned the events that followed their arrival, and as hard as he tried to resist the impulse to draw his mother into the violent, ghastly scenes they perpetrated, he couldn’t stop himself. Not unlike the prints his silent companion had left for him at his bedside, his narrative devolved. His once sunny idylls darkened into subterranean spectacle. He thought to hide these images from his father, but, perhaps to better understand the reason he couldn’t release them from his mind, when his father asked one morning over breakfast if he had more drawings to share with him, Bloom handed them over, and when he did, he watched his father’s face change. His expression grew disturbed, and in an injured voice, he said, No, no, my dear, these won’t do. No, we mustn’t allow this to happen to you. Not to you, too.

He didn’t send these drawings to the framer. Rather, he quietly hid them away. They disappeared to some secret place. Out of sight. When Bloom asked where they had gone, his father shook his head and said, It was wrong of me to encourage you. Jacob didn’t admonish the boy. He didn’t punish him. On the contrary, his tone was kind and contrite. But it was admonishment enough for Bloom to see, in the wake of this expression of regret, his father’s features return to their fragile, disconsolate shape. It was punishment enough to see his fascination wane, to watch it turn limpid and resigned. Once again the idle glaze to which Bloom had grown accustomed frosted his father’s eyes, and once again the inconsolable man escaped into his garden labyrinths, into the dark shadows of a past Bloom couldn’t see, and within the passages of the narrow warrens, Jacob paced. Around plantings and trimmings, he mindlessly wandered, migrated from one figure to the next. From the tower’s pavilion Bloom observed his father pace a tortuous route through the desert gales. On he paced when the fire season delivered flames to Mount Terminus’s nearby canyons. He paced until, one day, he did not.

And on that day, Bloom watched him ride down the mountain dressed in a suit, cleaned and pressed. And for some weeks after this first trip down the switchback, he frequently repeated the journey, sometimes staying away for several nights at a time. When Bloom would ask where he had gone and what he had been doing, his father said he had been tending to a business matter he could no longer avoid.

*   *   *

Out of pity, Bloom wondered, or perhaps because this was her preferred method of entertaining herself—through mysteries and intrigues—he began to receive from Roya unusual notes, which she left in the most peculiar places. The first he felt inside the toe of his left shoe when he was dressing one morning. As if written by a child with an unsteady hand, it read, I have a secret. The following day he discovered in the toe of his right shoe another note that read, In the library is a book on whose cover is a blue pyramid. For several hours Bloom browsed the library’s lower shelves and for several hours more from the rungs of a ladder he browsed the library’s upper shelves, and only after having glanced at nearly every book cover in their large collection did he locate on the highest shelf in the library’s farthest corner the cover he was looking for. There on a thin volume titled Too Loud a Solitude was a blue pyramid, at the center of which was inset a figure of a pharaoh, sitting upright in a sarcophagus. The pharaoh’s eyes were open and his mouth was agape, and behind the cover when he turned it over he found a bookmark on which was written in Roya’s penmanship: The house has a secret. As it served no purpose to implore a woman who couldn’t hear and didn’t speak to reveal what she uncovered during her furtive movements through their corridors and rooms, Bloom trusted Roya would soon enough deliver a new clue to draw the mystery she had set in motion to a point of comprehension. Bloom’s patience was rewarded one afternoon, when, at lunch, Roya served him a sandwich and a glass of lemonade. Rolled inside the cloth napkin accompanying his meal were three sheets of parchment. On each was a miniature drawing whose lines were straight and whose corners were square and whose images were three skeletal representations of each level of their home. These illustrations, however, delineated neither the rooms with which Bloom was familiar nor the passageways leading to these rooms, but rather an elaborate system of connecting stairwells and corridors that, so far as he knew, had never been built. To Roya, who was standing across from where he sat in the dining room, Bloom silently mouthed: Did you draw these? She turned and walked around the long table at whose center he sat, and when she arrived at his side she pointed to a corner of the parchment where he could see, obscured by the tint of the paper’s border, a signature: Manuel Salazar. So she could see his lips, he looked up at her and asked, Who is Manuel Salazar? As she had done on the day she handed him his mother’s drawing of his father, she reached into the pocket of her skirt and removed a clipping from a page of a book. It read: The parallax of time helps us to the true positions of a conception. Then, from her opposite pocket, she removed another clipping on which was printed: As the parallax of space helps us to that of a star. To this, Bloom shook his head. She looked at him with the same indifference with which she looked at everything. She replaced the slips of paper in her pocket, along with the illustrations she had presented to the boy with his meal, and pointed with the same hand to his sandwich and then to the lemonade, indicating to him that he should eat. So he ate, and while he ate, she stood over him and watched him eat, and when Bloom had taken his last bite, he looked up again to Roya’s face to see, this time, a chink of light in the darkness of her eyes. For an instant, he could see a violet-tinged nimbus flare on the circumferences of her pupils, and he knew when she turned and walked away from him and rounded the head of the table, he was meant to follow her.

They entered the kitchen through a swinging door and walked past halved heads of cabbage arranged on a woodblock, and on they went to the service entrance at the base of the tower, where from a leather pouch nailed to the cellar door Roya removed two flashlights, one for him and one for her, and together they descended below ground. Shining his light onto the pleats of her skirt, Bloom followed her through the archways separating food stores from wine racks, old furniture from hot water tanks, empty space from empty space, and in one of the vacant vaults, in which the dry afternoon heat was trapped and felt most oppressive, in which the hiss and groan of the plumbing sounded most monstrous, Roya stopped and stood before a brick pillar wider than any of the other supports that bolstered the load of the villa. She paused for a moment to look at Bloom. She stood very still with the light shining up the middle of her blouse and onto her chin; then, for the first time Bloom had ever seen it happen, Roya smiled. She smiled not a radiant smile, or a smile that signified hope or delight. She smiled as she would if she were asleep and dreaming of something colorful and airy. And with this listless expression from which glistened a thin sliver of her teeth, she reached out her free hand, pressed it against the bricks, and, with only the slightest force of her weight leaning onto the pillar’s exterior, its face gave way and swung inward to reveal at its crack the hinges of a door. When the door had opened fully, there before Bloom was a dark shaft.

Roya stepped back now and stretched out her free hand. Twice she pressed at the air with her palm. Then a third time. At which point the boy stepped inside and pointed his flashlight upward. The dim bulb cast a cone of orange incandescence onto the rungs of a wooden ladder that so far as Bloom could see climbed into a thicker darkness. He turned to look back at Roya, but she was no longer there. Into the darkness of the cellar, she had silently withdrawn. Into the darkness, she had noiselessly stepped away as only she could. The boy thought for a moment he hadn’t the courage to climb the ladder to see what secret was at its top. But as soon as he placed his flashlight in his trouser pocket, whatever trepidation he felt was overtaken by curiosity, and in no time at all he had scaled high enough so that when he looked down to see what progress he had made, darkness filled the space below him. At the ladder’s end, he arrived at a door, behind which he anticipated finding a corridor like one of those he had seen in the diagrams presented to him by Roya in the dining room, one that would take him on a Thesean journey through internal passageways, but when he lifted the door’s lever and pushed it away from him, instead of encountering what he saw imprinted on the parchment, he was met by a soft expulsion of stale air and the sight of an enclosed room whose ceiling slanted with the pitch of the roof.

There were no windows here, yet, strangely, the space filled with a dull gray glow that misted out into the chamber and clung to him as would a fine silt. He stepped into the pall, and with each footfall forward, the floorboards creaked with vague, cacophonous sounds, not unlike those a chick might hear from the interior of its shell at the moment of its birth. On the wall adjacent to the door was painted in fresco the face of Cyclops, whose eye was a convex piece of glass rimmed with gold. Out of it, a beam of light illuminated an oval mirror hung at an angle on the opposite wall, and, on this day, the mirror projected onto a round table a granular image—awash in grays—of Roya, who was now sitting on the chaise longue in the gallery. She faced the frieze above the fireplace, staring through it to him with a knowing grin. For quite some time Bloom marveled at Roya’s unmoving image and then gravitated to the wall opposite the entrance, where encased behind beveled glass were shelves on which he found all the objects his silent companion had brought to his bedside. And a great deal more. Stacks of unused parchment. Baskets filled with nibs and quills. Tins of pigment. Etched woodblocks bundled in twine. In a brass chamber pot, a collection of hairpins, each rusted tooth crowned by a bouquet of black roses. Above the shelves was a long cabinet anchored to the wall, behind whose doors he discovered a leather-bound diary written in Spanish and signed on the opening page by the same hand that had drawn the hidden labyrinths. Although he didn’t read a word of Spanish, there were a great number of drawings in these pages to hold the boy’s interest, sketches of the pastoral and gruesome scenes with which he was already familiar, and then more detailed drawings of grand villas that might have been, variations on rooms and gardens and statuary, on towers and their arcaded pavilions. And finally appeared the plans for the villa that would be. That was.

Before the table holding Roya’s still image, he sat in an armchair positioned so whoever occupied its seat saw the gallery projected upright. And there, in his silent companion’s company, he sorted through the remaining pages, in which landscape and architecture no longer existed as Manuel Salazar’s sole preoccupations. In these pages lived evidence of a burgeoning obsession with a woman who appeared at first as a shadow on the periphery of the estate’s construction, and who, slowly, after many months, inched closer and closer to the foreground, until she occupied it completely. From thereafter, the scale of the unfinished buildings and the unfinished grounds diminished, receded, to vanishing points, until they disappeared altogether and were replaced by the woman, alone. As if floodlit on an empty stage. Bloom had yet to reach the age at which he could appreciate what moved a man of free will to devote himself to what he beheld in a single subject, but he was nevertheless captivated, image after image, by the only facet of this woman’s countenance that was at all telling. Whereas her face was a vision of cold, hard balance and structure, whereas her eyes were perfect orbs that reflected neither light nor warmth, whereas her neck was slim and fixed, poised with the rigidity of an idealized human form, her left hand, whether it was at rest on her hip or holding a charm to the outline of her breast, held its fingers splayed, with a single digit dimpling a soft curve of flesh, a detail that, had it not been there, would have moved the boy to wonder if a woman such as the one drawn by Manuel Salazar could have ever been conceived in a world other than that of a man’s dream. More engrossing still were the pages he discovered at the end of this volume, in which he saw drawings as exacting as he would ever see. Only to these, his attention focused not on this grand lady’s face or the way she positioned her hands on her body, but to her garments, which were not the style of dress one would presume a woman would wear into the untidiness of desecrated ground. Rather, she was dressed in gowns and robes so rich with ornamentation that—if stretched flat and hung on cloistered walls—they could have been medieval tapestry. In their stitching, however, were no obvious symbols from which to divine any religious design. Instead, woven into the fabric were visions of unrequited love and architectural despair, of ruined Eastern cities, topographies of shattered teeth, decaying civilizations, home to no one but one man and one woman, who, from great distances, stood apart, the woman never seeing the man, the man always gazing from atop the rubble of fallen minarets, through cracks in ruptured walls, across dry beds of garden oases, his arms entwined in vines of tropical trees, in ivy clinging to crumbled walls, the man looking at the woman, his expression, like his father’s, entrenched with lines formed from ceaseless longing, from never-ending despair.

*   *   *

The attraction of Manuel Salazar’s secret chamber drew Bloom back to face the eye of Cyclops many times in the months that followed. He often lay awake at night preoccupied with the dark cavity hidden inside the villa’s walls, and he imagined there the face of a man resembling his father’s, and he imagined reflected on the projection table the unblemished visage he had come to memorize from Salazar’s diary, and he wondered, Had she sat as still for Salazar as Roya sat for him? Did she know he was there observing her? Could she feel his need to be nearby? On one such night he weighed these thoughts, Bloom’s father appeared to him in what he thought at first was a dream. A barely visible outline of a man, a shock of white hair glimmering like the twilight’s gloaming, rose up over him, and said, Come, my dear, we have a journey to take.

Bloom reached out to touch his father, and when he was convinced that what he saw and heard was real, he protested, But, Father, the sun hasn’t risen.

It will soon enough.

I want to sleep.

Later, Jacob said, you’ll sleep.

Bloom, as he neared the end of his twelfth year, had grown to the height of a man, still thin and lanky, but sizable enough that his father grunted when he pulled his weight upright. Jacob wet his hands in the washbasin on the dressing table, and with more attention than Bloom was accustomed to receiving from him, the elder Rosenbloom crept his fingers through his hair and pulled back the tight coils that stubbornly clung to the corners of his eyes when his forehead moistened in the heat.

There now, he said. Dress yourself and meet me downstairs.

Outside, Jacob sat atop the buckboard, holding the reins of the mare, which appeared to Bloom hypnotized by the lightening colors stratifying the sky. When he climbed on board and took his seat, his father placed an attaché case on his lap, and just as Jacob was about to turn away from him, he looked onto his son’s face not unlike the way the horse had become transfixed by the aurora. The grooves between his brow squeezed shut, and appearing as if he wanted to elaborate on the purpose of their trip, or on something else altogether, Jacob shook his head to cast away whatever was on his mind, and turning his focus to the mare’s ass, he snapped the leather straps, sending them on their way. They rode over the gravel drive dividing the gardens in which Jacob spent his days, and because it was rare he and Bloom ever ventured beyond Mount Terminus’s gates, because Bloom felt a deepening connection to the estate’s creator, he was drawn back to the villa’s grandeur. He watched it fade into the distance, and as he did so, he noticed, standing in silhouette between two pillars of the tower’s arcaded pavilion, the diminutive figure of Roya. He watched her stand there before a crimson sky for as long as he could see her and looked away only when his father said in a conciliatory voice, There, there, we are not going very far.

They switched back and forth down the mountain road without talking, and cantered past citrus groves rooted to ruts of desiccated earth. Extending into the distance as far as they could see, baubles of fruit weighted down muscular limbs. Dust devils formed in the wake of their tracks and spun into Aeolian wisps of smoke whose tendrils dispersed upward into vapor trails, on which a condor lofted and circled about. When some hours later they reached the bluff overlooking the ocean’s expanse, they descended a slope to the coastal trail, not far from whose head stood alone at the edge of the beach a blinding structure, tall and long and molten white. Illuminated by the morning sun, it appeared to Bloom a mirage, as liquid and formless as the sea. As they neared it, the building’s shape solidified into what looked like a steamship three tiers high, along each of whose decks ambled figures neutered of their gender by white gowns and wide-brimmed hats. Beyond this building was a smaller vessel, where a horseshoe hung on a brace over a pair of barn doors. It was to this structure the father steered the mare, and here the man and his son disembarked, and left the horse and buckboard with a liveryman. Jacob handed the attendant a coin and said they would only be a moment. He then took the attaché case from Bloom and pressed his hand to his back to set him in motion. They walked together onto white planks filling the gap between the two buildings, where, before they reached its end, Jacob halted. He turned to his son and looked into his eyes with the same probing uncertainty with which he had searched his face earlier that morning. As if he were apologizing in advance for doing something he knew to be of questionable judgment, he said, You needn’t say a word. You must come with me, but if you don’t feel moved to, you needn’t utter a sound. It was impossible for Bloom to comprehend the meaning of his father’s caution, the reason for his contrition, but when they reached the end of the boardwalk and turned the corner, it became clear. Spread out before him on a deck overlooking a significant region of the beach, the same gowned figures he had witnessed ambling along the landings reclined in rows of white chaises arranged like the groves they had just ridden through, and standing in contrast to everyone and everything about them at the far end, were the three dark figures who came and went, to and from Mount Terminus, dressed in black long coats and bowler hats.

The three men whose faces Bloom had never seen. There they were, forming a dark constellation around one of the lounge chairs. Bloom’s father placed a hand on his shoulder and said again: You needn’t utter a sound. They walked in and out of shadows cast by white umbrellas, past gaunt faces lathered in zinc. Bloom noticed hands clutching handkerchiefs spotted with blood; he avoided the stare of milky eyes thick with jaundice. At regular intervals, the sickliest of the patients appeared to suffer simultaneous fits. Bodies convulsed in on themselves, rasping coughs from lungs too damaged to expel whatever invading substance occupied them. The sad noises once trumpeted into the ocean breeze acted like a contagion, setting off a percussive echo of croaks and caws into the crash of waves. I needn’t say a word, thought Bloom when he and his father halted before the humorless faces of the grim triumvirate, whose motives remained concealed in the cloudy rheum of their eyes. Lank hair fell from under the brims of their hats, dampening insipid brows; sweat gathered on the thick bulbs of their noses and occasionally dripped onto the toes of their boots. Their mouths were thin, their jaws locked, and each possessed a unique taxonomy of pink, wormlike scars fossilized on their jaws, around the orbits of their eyes, on the knuckles of their brawny hands. They held a perimeter around an invalid, passing an unlit cigar under his nose. Unlike the other infirm, this man didn’t wear the wide-brimmed hat or the cake of zinc on his face. Nor did he wear the white gown. Instead, he reclined in a cream silk robe tied off with a purple sash. While his thick arms and chest were matted with wiry hair, the crown of his head was bald and browned, and what hair remained above the ear and around the pate was white and cropped close to the scalp. His face belonged to that of a caricature. Wide nostrils. Fat lips. Heavy jowls. Hooded eyes. It belonged to a man who had inflicted, who had been afflicted by, pain.

At the first sight of Bloom, the steely eyes of the reclining brute softened and became those of a moody, quizzical child. His cigar fell limp between his thick fingers as he said in a voice deep and graveled and full of bent foreign syllables, Remarkable. Absolutely remarkable. Without breaking his open gaze, he told Bloom to come closer, to sit with him. The young Rosenbloom looked at his father, who nodded his assurance. And with that, Bloom left his father’s side and sat at the man’s hip.

Your papa has said who I am?

Bloom shook his head.

No, of course he hasn’t. The old man set his cigar in his lap and rested a coarse palm on Bloom’s cheek. You’re a fortunate young man to have such a sensible papa. With his brow raised, he drew his chin to his chest. He has done good today. For you, young man, he has done good. He searched Bloom’s eyes again, this time as if he were hunting for evidence of something intimate they shared. He now withdrew his hand from Bloom’s cheek and turned his attention to Jacob. The air. The sound of the salted sea. These men of God here, they say it will do miracles for me. But they say in the same breath, I don’t help myself because I don’t believe. What do you say, Mr. Rosenbloom? Do I suffer from a lack of faith? Bloom’s father stepped forward without replying and presented the attaché to the sickly man, who lifted it into the waiting hands of the nearest member of the triumvirate. He then reached into a pocket stitched onto his robe and removed a silver pendant, half of a coin embossed with a full moon, bright and shiny on one side, dark with tarnish on the other. Give me your hand, malchik. It is for this I’ve asked your father to bring you here today. Bloom lifted his hand and in it the man placed his gift. One day soon, he said as he looked at Bloom’s father, as if he were speaking to him as much as to his son, you will know its other half. He then smiled as he closed Bloom’s fist. This world of ours, young Rosenbloom, it is a world of wondrous surprises, is it not? Bloom nodded in agreement. One never knows what astonishments await us. Isn’t that so, Papa? The old man lifted his heavy lids and once again directed his eyes at the elder Rosenbloom. Jacob didn’t answer the man. He instead tugged on Bloom’s collar, and when the young man looked up he saw his father’s chin motioning him away. At that moment, he could see in the hollows of his father’s eyes the malignant influence these dark figures held over his will. For the first time, he could see in the tightening folds of his father’s face how terrified he was of these men. As they walked off in the direction from which they had come, rather than upset Jacob’s pride by asking where these brutes derived their power, or what the significance of the pendant was, Bloom took hold of his hand and said, When we return home, shall we climb to the top of the tower and look at the sea?

*   *   *

Neither Bloom nor his father mentioned in the following days and weeks anything about their journey to the sea or the identity of the man who had set his hand on the younger Rosenbloom’s cheek. Bloom asked no questions about what the attaché case contained or what might have been the meaning of the pendant. He was deeply curious, of course, and at times was tempted to breach the darkness his father had forbidden him to enter all his life, but Bloom sensed the questions he was keeping to himself would be answered soon enough. He intuited from the softening of his father’s manner, from the warmth he heard in the tone of his voice, from the concern he expressed for Bloom’s well-being, his forbearance would not persist.

Bloom, now approaching the age of manhood, had become familiar enough with his father’s character to know that whatever the nature of the transaction he had witnessed on the beach, it was most certainly one marking a significant change in his association with this man. Something of consequence had transpired. Something momentous enough, his father was compelled to break from the comfort of his routines to ready Bloom for what was to come. Jacob ceased spending the entirety of his days tending to the grounds and communing with the animist spirits of his topiary; instead, he approached the courtyard each morning from a vanishing point at the end of a path dividing the dark grove of avocado trees from the bright lattices of the rose garden. His arrivals coincided with Roya’s departures: as she entered the shadows of the loggia and disappeared behind the villa’s walls, he walked between the twin cottages forming the yard’s border, bowed his head through a pergola wearing a toupee of bougainvillea, and announced his presence with a grim smile.

In the same manner Bloom sat with his mute companion, he sat with his father, who drew their attention to the crescent-shaped building terraced onto the shelf of the short, crescent-shaped mesa. One afternoon while looking at this structure, Jacob described a place on the sluggish Belus River where in the middle of the first century a ship belonging to soda traders spread out along the Phoenician shore to prepare a meal of fish stew. He told his son they had no stones to support their cooking pots, so they placed lumps of soda from the ship under them, and when these became hot and fused with the sand on the beach, streams of an unknown, translucent liquid flowed. This, he said, was the origin of glass. This, he said, has given our eyes their greatest purpose. His father patted the air with his long fingers, indicating to Bloom that he should remain still, and off he went up the stone steps with a skeleton key dangling from a string tied to his wrist. When he reached the landing, Bloom watched him follow the curve of the building until he rounded its side. A gust of desert wind rustled the grove, through which he could hear the unmistakable cry of a long-unopened door. The sharp noise of the stiff hinges scattered the lizards on the building’s surface; they scurried and refixed themselves into a new configuration, until a few moments later, with as little ease as it had opened, the door shut, and a new pattern was formed. Around the corner his father walked, pressing to the chest of his coveralls a wooden case nearly as tall and wide as he. When he had descended the stairs and reached Bloom, he said, Today we will give your eyes greater purpose. Climb the tower after lunch and this will be waiting for you. He turned to go, and then turned back. Looking at his dusty boots, he said, You must prepare yourself, my dear.

What for?

Jacob tapped the case with his knuckle. With this, you will see.

*   *   *

Assembled inside the tower’s pavilion was a reflecting telescope whose optical tube was crafted from ash and trimmed with cast iron. It was mounted to a decorative globe resting atop a pedestal whose thin base was held secure by metal supports. All was affixed to a dais that snugly fit onto the shoulders of a tripod. The lacquer applied to preserve the wood had darkened and in places was altogether stripped bare; aquamarine streaks of oxidation had begun to accrete over the iron’s surface; and whatever words had been etched into the brass plaque set onto the dais’s foundation had long since been rubbed away into a flat sheen. Old as the telescope might have been, when Bloom set the orbit of his eye against the viewing piece, the mirrors magnified into his mind a wide field of vision, full of clear images, their colors crisp and containing no aberrations, all of it so impressive and bright, when he saw what was in its sights, it summoned within the young man the thrill of being present at the focal point. But when this initial excitement wore off, and he was left to contemplate the substance of what he saw, he wanted some explanation for what was out there. His father had trained the tube’s aperture onto the section of winding road that snaked up to the estate’s gates, and there, occupying the annular frame, was a team of hulking men swinging picks, driving them in unison into the ground. Following them, a line of laborers turned over earth with shovels, and beyond them, a line pulled rakes; next rolled carts piled high with tarmac, and what was beyond that, Bloom wouldn’t see until some time later, when the men who spread the pitch onto the raked earth edged out from behind a turn on the road. It would then be some more time before he saw the stacks of the steamrollers belch black smoke as they paved the tarred macadam into a smooth surface. And there the parade came to its end, all for the three dark figures he had encountered on the beach. They casually strolled up the grade, each biting down on a smoldering cigar; the tails of their long coats, the brims of their hats, catching the steam rising up from the cooling pavement.

*   *   *

When they sat down to dinner that evening, Bloom’s mind remained fixed on the images he observed that afternoon through the eyepiece of the telescope. Seeing as it was his father who revealed to him the brigade of laborers advancing up the mountain, he assumed he would explain the circumstances of their arrival. But the elder Rosenbloom deliberately avoided the subject, and, instead, spoke for the entirety of their meal about the many ways the visible world had excited his boyhood imagination. He spoke of the philosophers and men of science whose intent was to prove there was a mystical unity in all creation. He spoke of the ways in which he saw the world as ecstatically alive, to what extent he believed light to be the exuberance of God’s great goodness and truth, how mirrors and prisms divine the means to reflect that truth. He spoke of Shakespeare’s Prospero and Marlowe’s Faust, of a disciple of John Dee’s who descended into an erupting Vesuvius to study its smoking vents, of a mad fantasist who spent his life’s work disproving the Tower of Babel could have ever reached the moon. For as long as men of imagination appreciate the wonders of the mind, he insisted, they will draw inspiration from such men; throughout the ages, their spirits will continue to manifest themselves in characters we can only now dream of.

That, my dear Bloom, was the type of man I wanted to become, Jacob said. One whose ideas and inventions had the power to shape visions.

Here his father paused. And here Bloom looked up from his meal, and he could see a wet film had formed over his father’s eyes. But you can see in my face every day what I’ve become.

No, said Bloom.

Yes, insisted his father. He pushed back his chair and stood up. Come, there’s something I want to share with you in the drawing room. Something, I believe, you need to see.

*   *   *

If we lived one hundred years ago, his father said as he led Bloom to the parlor after dinner, if this were a great ballroom or cathedral, and held in it several hundred spectators, I might introduce what I am about to show you by declaring, That which is about to happen before your eyes is not frivolous spectacle. It is made for the man who thinks, for the philosopher who likes to lose his way. This is a spectacle that man can use to instruct himself in the bizarre effects of the imagination. When it combines vigor and derangement. If I were the great Etienne-Gaspard, who began all his phantasmagorias this way, I would spread open my arms in some grand gesture and you would see floating into the center of the room an apparition, or a phantom, or the head of Medusa, or, perhaps, have rising up out of Daedalus’s labyrinth the waxen wings of Icarus moving toward the radiance of the sun. And, I daresay, Jacob said with a hush, you would be dazzled.

The elder Rosenbloom ushered his son toward a table in the center of the room and said, Open it. There on the table rested a wooden box not unlike the one his father had retrieved earlier that day from the crescent-shaped dwelling. The young Rosenbloom did as he was told: he unlatched an iron clasp and pushed open the lid, underneath which he found, immersed in fitted compartments, two copper objects with thick veins of patina running through their wear. The shape of the first resembled an oil lamp; the other was a cylindrical lens at whose base was a slot into which one could slide a silver dollar. Within the tube, Bloom saw when he pulled it out, was a configuration of mirrors; in its orbit was fixed a clouded lens. Careful now, said his father as he removed the lamp, it’s very old. Jacob took the tube from Bloom’s hands, delicately fitted the two parts together, and set them on the table. From a separate compartment, he pulled out a box within the box, and when he opened it, he asked Bloom to extinguish the drawing room’s flames. As soon as Bloom had done this, and they were ensconced in darkness, his father struck a match and lit the lamp, and he instructed the young Rosenbloom to sit facing the empty wall. Bloom sat down in the armchair his father slept in most evenings and heard the first of the slides slip through the slot. When it was illuminated by the lamplight, he saw an image of his mother standing before a window in which he could see, reflecting back, her profile. She painted these, said his father. With a very fine brush and a magnifier, she reduced herself into miniature. Always with a shadow image standing somewhere nearby, watching, observing. Do you see, my dear? It’s important that you see.

Bloom, who hadn’t initially seen the shadow, now saw it quite clearly and said as much to his father. Yes, Father, I see.

The elder Rosenbloom changed the slide to a likeness of his wife standing before a mirror in which her reflection stared past her to the ghostly double, this one’s lines better defined, bold enough that he could see expressed, in the creases of its eyes, scorn and contempt for the image reflecting from the mirror. And this one?

Yes, Father, this one is clear.

And then, said his father, she disposed of the windows and mirrors altogether, and, well, you can see here—again he switched the slide—and here—and again switched—and here, how the shade becomes more and more lifelike, and begins to resemble your mother in every way. You see, my dear, what she saw?

Yes, Father, I see what she saw.

Yes, said his father.

But why? asked Bloom. Why did she depict herself this way?

Bloom heard the tink of glass, and then the sound repeated, and then again, and he knew from that sound, and from the pauses between them, as much as his father wanted to continue with this, he had reached an impasse.

Tomorrow, Father, said the young Rosenbloom. There is always tomorrow.

Yes, his father agreed. Tomorrow.

*   *   *

The following evening, and for several more evenings afterward, Bloom’s father produced a new optical device, and with each new device, Bloom witnessed the furtherance of his mother’s peculiar preoccupation. Animated on spinning disks and carousels and drums, his mother ran away from herself through long corridors, hid from herself in dark closets, knelt before herself to beg for forgiveness.

Do you see? was his father’s refrain.

To which Bloom said, Yes, Father, I see.

Do you see how she suffered?

Yes, Father, I see. But I still don’t understand the cause of her suffering.

No, said Jacob. How could you?

And as these viewings went on night after night, Bloom said on more than one occasion, Please, Father, you needn’t subject yourself to these if it causes you pain.

Yes, said his father, I do.

*   *   *

At home, in Woodhaven, his father told Bloom on one of these nights, Mother was so possessed by these visions she could no longer be left to her solitude. Both her doctor and our rabbi thought she should be committed to an asylum, but I couldn’t do that to her. I decided for both our sakes to take her away. I put the foundry in the hands of my associate, Mr. Geller, who you may or may not remember … I packed a few trunks and we boarded a train with no destination in mind. We traveled aimlessly for several months, wandered deeper and deeper into the heartland, and along the way, if your mother chose to be stubborn or defiant, if her condition made her listless or confused, I didn’t care—I would carry her in my arms if need be, and force her to stand on her feet, to open her eyes, to look upon the wondrous beauty we encountered along the route of our journey, and the more distance we gained from home, the more westward we moved, the more I agitated your mother to be active, the more she began to resemble the woman I had fallen in love with. By happenstance, we met a man in town who told us of this place, this estate, and one day we visited it. Mother was immediately drawn to the gardens and the groves, to the view at the edge of the promontory; on the summit of the mountain, in the quiet of the parlors, she felt at peace with her thoughts and at ease with me, so the day following, I bought it, I bought it all, the entire mountain and a great deal of the land extending to the sea, so no soul could intrude on Mother’s happiness. And not very long after we arrived, some several months had passed, perhaps, no more, Mother started painting again, and took pleasure in her work. In landscapes, and only landscapes. Absent from them were any human figures at all. I, of course, encouraged this. And to show her how much so, we periodically ventured out into the valley in search of new terrain. To inspire her eye. And when she tired of the valley’s barrenness, we journeyed beyond it. One day, while roaming trails we weren’t familiar with, we arrived at the river I have taken you to, and then at the lake, and when we reached that enormous body of water, and looked upon its calm surface, Mother saw in her reflection something of herself she hadn’t observed in a very long time. Whatever it was she saw, she felt moved to wade into that water, fully clothed, to the knees at first, then to the waist, and the neck, until she was immersed, her yellow skirt floating around the top of her head, she looked like a daisy, full of warmth and light. In that instance, on the shore of those waters we stand before on the Day of Atonement, your mother transformed. She was reborn. As if some agent of God had revived her spirit.

And in the days that followed, as a gesture of love, I suppose, or perhaps as a way to preserve the place where I witnessed this miracle, I was compelled to seek out the men who owned the water rights to the lake, and, to protect that place of sacred beauty, to preserve the landmark that filled me with hope, I bought them as well. I hired a local family to manage the irrigation of the farms in the region, to manage the lands and the wildlife, and for the few years Mother and I lived on the estate, we frequently traveled there, often enough, for certain … But then we were happy. More happy than we had ever been. And with our happiness constant for an extended passage of time—as people are prone to do—we both began to forget our troubles. We forgot what condition of mind Mother was in when we first arrived on Mount Terminus. She and I, both, took for granted the miracle we had experienced in the rift valley, at the lakeshore, and I, thinking Mother’s change was irreversible, started to feel restless. She had become pregnant with you, my dear, and as I saw her growing larger and larger, I selfishly longed for Woodhaven, to return to the business, to my workshop, to the foundry, to do something more industrious than caring for my wife, and I began to wonder, what precisely was keeping us from going home? Mother, after all, had been well for so long, I didn’t think it wrong or unfair, I certainly didn’t think it a risky proposition to return. And, of course, when I did make the proposal, Mother convinced me I had sacrificed enough of my time for her. She said it was important I return to my work. She said herself she felt the pull of Woodhaven, that she dreamed of raising you in our old home. And while I was convinced these words were spoken from her heart, I did see something in her eyes during that conversation, something I chose to ignore. It was little more than a flicker of light, what amounted to no more than a few frames in one of her projections, a miniature moment cautioning me she was still as fragile as she had ever been. In that exchange—had I only been more alert—I would have seen how easily she could reverse course. Instead, who knows what my mind did? Disregarded the possibility? Interpreted it as a vestigial fear from a period in our marriage I believed to be long since past? And so, we packed away what we had accumulated here over the years, and returned to the East, where, in reverse course, she experienced a decline in such small gradations I wasn’t even aware it was taking place. Not until it was too late. Not until she had disappeared from me again did I understand to what extent she was irretrievably lost.

You must remember, Jacob said after a long silence, how faraway her eyes could be. And Bloom recalled how she stared into the fires at night.

You do remember, don’t you?

Yes, Father. I do.

Yes?

Yes. Like you. In the gardens.

Yes, said the elder Rosenbloom with a contemplative pause. Like me in the gardens.

*   *   *

The morning after his father confessed to Bloom what had been weighing on his conscience these many years, the elder Rosenbloom walked into the courtyard carrying a crowbar, and proceeded up the steps to the crescent dwelling. Bloom watched from his bedroom window as his father wedged the bar’s bucked teeth behind the shutters and pressed his body into the work of dislodging them. A creak sounded, followed by a loud crack. Jacob maneuvered his way around the edges, one window after the next, the creak and crack building into a steady rhythm, and before the sun had reached its apex in the sky, a pile of discarded wood gathered on the landing. Meralda went and returned with a mop and pail, and when she had finished her part, the elder Rosenbloom stood at his son’s door and said, There is more to say, and soon enough, I will say it all, but for the time being, my dear, come along. Bloom followed his father out of his room and down the stairs, into the yard and up the stone steps to the top of the mesa, and there Bloom saw through the windows, a room, far from derelict, certainly never burned from within, but, rather, a spacious opening, bright and clean and white. I’ve cleared everything away and arranged it in the library, said his father, then he pointed to a large wooden cabinet with a scope rising out of the top, All for that.

What is it? asked Bloom.

It was for that, he said, I sacrificed your mother’s calm.

They walked around the corner and entered the dwelling, and once there his father led him to the back of the cabinet. He pulled away its covering to reveal inside a complex system of spools and feeds, clips and mechanisms throughout which snaked a gray film. This one, Bloom’s father said as he touched his finger to a network of cogs, is the Rosenbloom Drive. Without which, neither this device nor any motion picture projector can function properly. From this, he said, we want for nothing. As he turned the reels with his finger, he said, It’s little more than a timepiece, really, a mechanism that makes it possible for your eye to perceive a crisp and fluid movement of light and shadow, leaving the mind free from distraction to interpret the images as it would the life passing before you. His father reached into a compartment, pulled out a battery the size of an ingot, and replaced it with another of the same. He then handed Bloom a nickel and said he should go ahead and give it a try. Bloom walked around and slipped the coin into the slot at the front of the box, and as soon as it clunked into a metal bin, the viewer’s mechanisms sounded a whir and a continuous clicking, and up through the eyepiece, he witnessed a flickering of light. Do you hear it? asked his father. The clicks?

Yes, said Bloom.

That, he told him, is the sound of the Rosenbloom Drive at work. Bloom listened to it for a moment, and imagined his father listening to the original clicks of the very first machine, and he then placed his hands on the sturdy wooden box to feel its vibration. Go on, said his father, tell me what’s inside. Bloom bent over and rested his eyes against the mask of the peephole and felt himself aroused at the sight of a woman balancing on her right foot atop the capital of a Corinthian column. Her left foot she rested flatly against the inner thigh of her extended leg. Her arms she encircled over a Corinthian mound of ivy-twined hair. Very slowly, as if her fingers were rays of light, she broke the halo over her head and reached into the darkness behind her. With an extraordinary display of flexibility, she shifted her hips forward and extended her arms and curled back into the shape of a dewdrop, at which point her hands enfolded her ankle and the column began to rotate. It revolved once and then twice, and at the beginning of the third revolution, a translucent shroud billowed from out of the darkness above and collapsed over her body. When the column finished its rotation, a light flashed and the woman disappeared, leaving only the shroud limply hanging over the capital’s leaves.

A woman, said Bloom. Spinning and disappearing.

Yes, said his father with an amused grin, I know it well.

And with that, Jacob reached into his pocket and pulled out the skeleton key he had used for the padlock the other day. The room, he said, is yours. Your mother practiced her art here, and so should you. And then from his other pocket, he removed Death, Forlorn, the miniature book he carried with him everywhere, and he said, If you would, I would like you to illustrate this for me.

*   *   *

A young couple, newly wed, travels to the sea. At the end of a mountain pass, they arrive at a parcel of land surrounded by a fortress wall. They ride the entire length of the circular road around it, and as far as they can see, the wall appears to be perfectly enclosed, without entrance or exit. When they descend to the bottom of the mountain, they stop for a meal at an inn where they meet a cloaked figure sitting at the bar. The stranger, they learn, lives behind the enclosed walls. He is about to explain how it is he accesses his home, when the waitress walks by and drops a tray of dishes. The kindhearted husband leaves the table for a moment to offer his help, and when he returns from the kitchen, his wife and the strange man have disappeared. The husband searches the woods and the storefronts of the town, and when he’s reached the apothecary at the end of the road, he notices in the front window a terrarium of mandrakes, and at the sight of them, his panic turns to despair. He enters the shop and takes from a shelf a bottle of arsenic, which he gulps down until there is no more. His body begins to wither, but before he has fallen to the floor, he is transported to a bed of nettles lying in the shadows of the enclosure at the top of the mountain, where, before him, a section of stones dematerializes to create a dark opening through which he can enter. The stranger he met at the inn is waiting for him when he has completed his passage. I am Death, he announces, and he asks why he has come to him without being called. The husband says to Death that he’s come in search of his wife, and Death says that his wife is beyond hope. He leads the husband into a cathedral whose cupola is lit by candlelight. Each candle, he explains, is a life, and when its flame is extinguished, the life is lost. Death confesses to the husband that he has grown weary. He is tired of being feared and wishes that the inevitable consequences of his actions weren’t absolute. He, therefore, offers the man a chance to save his wife. Let us see, he says, if you can alter the boundaries of fate. He makes appear three candles and says to him that if he can keep one of these three candles lit, his wife will be returned to him unharmed. Death first sends the man to save the lover of the Caliph of Baghdad from being buried alive by the Caliph’s gardener. He fails, and a candle is extinguished. Death sends him to save the lover of the Chinese emperor from the emperor’s archer, and at this task, too, the man fails, and a candle is extinguished. Death sends the man to save the fiancée of a Venetian tyrant, and here too, he fails, and the third candle is extinguished. Because he desires to see the young man succeed, Death offers him a final chance. He tells him that if before noon he can find a life that has yet to meet its fate, he will return his wife in exchange. Death returns the husband to the apothecary just as he is about to swallow the arsenic, and at that moment the clock strikes eleven. He returns to the inn, where he recalls having seen in the window of the second floor a feeble old woman. The old woman, happy for the company, invites him in to sit by the fire. He asks her if she would be willing to give up what remains of her life so that he can live his with his wife. To this, she says, Not one day, not one hour, not one breath. When the old woman is finished speaking, out of the fire pops an ember. The ember falls at the ruffle of a curtain and sets it ablaze. The fire laps at the walls and licks at the ceiling and spreads across the room. The home, it turns out, is the home of the waitress, who, from the street below, is now screaming for her child. As the fire continues to consume the room, the man finds the baby, sitting up in its bassinet near the edge of the flames. Death now appears and reaches out for the child. He says that if he places the babe in his arms, his wife will be returned to him. But the man has already decided what sacrifice he is willing to make for his beloved. He hurries to the window and drops the child into the arms of its mother, then walks into the inferno, from which Death sweeps him up in his arms, and says, This is meant to be. Moments later, the newly wed wife appears on the main road. She searches for her husband as her husband did for her, and once again the story begins.

*   *   *

After his father had placed the frail pages of Death’s allegory in his hand, Bloom began to spend his mornings in the studio. Every day after breakfast, he sat at a drawing table set before a pane of glass framing the courtyard, the walls of the villa, the cottages, the reflecting pool. And with each successive morning after breakfast he felt a keener and keener appetency to better understand the deeper meaning of his mother’s visions. While weighing in his mind the story handed to him by his father, he wondered if the fate of his sanity was in some way tethered to his mother’s. He wrote of what transpired between him and his father and left his summaries for Roya to find, and when the sheets of paper disappeared, he wrote such questions as Was it a natural deterioration she experienced? Or was there a precipitating cause? Am I destined to confuse the visions I see in my mind for what I perceived in my perceptions of world? But she never answered him. She did, however, sit beside him in his studio as he worked, sometimes for many hours. These were worrying thoughts, he told her on several occasions, ones from which he didn’t know how to dissociate himself. If he were, perhaps, a more typical young man, one who didn’t empathize with his father’s sensitivities, one who hadn’t been conditioned to tolerate his secrets and his silence, he might have pressed Jacob to explain his mother’s condition in more detail, but he couldn’t in good conscience—not for the time being, at any rate—ask him to confide in him any more than he had already. He had observed the great strength it took for his father to reveal what little he had. He had heard the hesitation in his voice, witnessed the way his nerves had been shaken. To ask more of him now, Bloom said to Roya, would be cruel, would it not? And so Bloom decided to wait, to exercise, as he had done for so long, patience.

*   *   *

Before long the sound of picks and shovels reached the top of the mountain, and not long afterward they heard, through the open windows and all about the grounds, the call and response of song keeping rhythm with the thwack and scrape of the men’s toil.

It’s a lo-o-o-ng John!

A lo-o-ng John!

He’s a lo-o-o-ng gone!

A l-o-o-ng gone!

Like a turkey through the corn!

A turkey through the corn!

Through the lo-o-o-ng corn!

The l-o-o-ng corn!

… Well, my John say-ed!

My John say-ed!

In the ten chap ten!

Ten chap ten!

If a man die!

A man die!

He will live again!

He will live again!

And from their camps each night just before the noise waned, Bloom heard:

Wait and let me tell you what your brother will do:

Fo’ your face, have a love for you.

’Hind your back, scandalize your name.

Jest the same you have to bear the blame.

O Lord, trouble so hard. O Lord, trouble so hard.

Don’t nobody know my troubles but God.

Yes, indeed, my troubles so hard.

When it was finished, the road ended well before Mount Terminus’s gate; it turned inward onto the long plateau downhill from the stand of eucalyptus. Early the next morning, not a full day after the completion of the work, Bloom heard, for the first time, the fiery combustion of motorcars. When the sound of the engines quieted, he looked out of his bedroom window to see, at the end of the cobbled path, his father, standing on a boulder under the long, spindling limbs at the edge of the estate. Bloom dressed and walked down into the courtyard and on through the pergola to the path’s end, and when he arrived, his father handed him a pair of binoculars. Bloom watched through the lenses the dozen or so men who had convened at the center of the clearing. Three carried scrolls of blueprints, three carried theodolites, the others held mallets and stakes and cones of twine.

But that’s our land, Bloom said to his father.

No, said his father. Not since the day we traveled to the sea.

For all these years, said Bloom, this is what they wanted?

This, said his father, and a great deal more.

And what have you given them?

Everything they’ve asked for.

I don’t understand.

I know, my dear. But you will soon enough.

The men carrying the tools gathered around a young man, tall and slim, dressed in a white suit whose cut was sharp in the shoulders and along the lapel. His hair had been tussled from the wind, and falling over his eyes was a rakish curl. He had a natural ease about him when he spoke, yet he held himself upright in such a way he appeared superior to those around him. He formed the men into groups and sent them on their way to different areas of the plateau, and when these men had set about their tasks, the young man turned his head to where Bloom and his father stood, and with a cold, hard gaze acknowledged he knew he was being observed. He made no attempt to wave or nod; he only tucked his hands into his trouser pockets and glared at them. And with his face now unobstructed by the others, Bloom was overcome by the uncanny feeling that he knew this young man. He was somehow familiar to him. Strangely so. He eased the binoculars away from his face and looked at his father, who said, They will be coming for a share of our water next.

And we will give it to them?

Yes, said Jacob.

The man below continued to look up to Bloom and his father, and Bloom could see when he raised the binoculars again, a dark emotion had entered the young man’s eyes. He began to tilt in their direction, and an instant later he was walking toward them. I want you to leave me now, said the elder Rosenbloom. I’d like to have a few words alone with this man.

Do you know him?

Please, my dear, be on your way.

Bloom did as he was told. He stepped back and walked the way he had come, and when he reached the courtyard, he climbed up to the studio landing, where he looked down to the stand of eucalyptus and saw through the binoculars the man emerge from the steep hike up the hill. The elder Rosenbloom extended his hand, but the young man didn’t take it. His father said a few words now, to which came no response. The elder Rosenbloom tried once more, but the young man stood his ground, and this time when his father failed to elicit a reaction, he made a polite gesture and walked away in the direction of his gardens. The young man watched the elder Rosenbloom walk off, and then, with his fists clenched at his sides, he followed.

This disturbing behavior concerned Bloom, so he, too, followed. He ran down the steps, into the villa, through the kitchen, and leaped up the stairwell of the tower, taking steps two by two, to the pavilion landing. Once there, he saw Jacob’s head wending through the maze of hedgerows, and saw his pursuer wasn’t very far behind. When they reached the corner of the garden for which his father was bound, the young man in the white suit looked up to see the topiary, and at the sight of it, he allowed his eyes to wander from the elder Rosenbloom to the leafy figure. He circled around it once, and then again, this time shaking his head. Bloom watched him through the eyepiece of the telescope now, and could see an expression of disbelief in the openness of his mouth and eyes. He now said something. What, Bloom, of course, couldn’t hear, but he believed he saw form on his lips No or How. And then You as he pointed a finger at the elder Rosenbloom. And another No or How. The sensation Bloom felt earlier returned. There was something familiar about this young man’s face, something familial, perhaps. And now his father’s pursuer circled the topiary one last time, and when he said his last words, he spat at Jacob’s feet and threw up a hand in disgust. When he reached the drive, Bloom could clearly see the shadows of his arms casting rude gestures onto the gravel below.

*   *   *

Over dinner that evening, Bloom asked his father why the man from the plateau had been so angry with him. He wanted to know if they had met each other before today. The elder Rosenbloom would only say, I would like for you to go out and make his acquaintance. The questions you have for me, pose them to him. And then we will talk. On the subject of the angry young man, he would say no more.

*   *   *

As the elder Rosenbloom said would happen, the same group of engineers and surveyors they had watched shape the lots below walked onto the estate some days later and began marking the land for a pipeline. Bloom, who, in Roya’s constant company, had begun to sketch his illustrations of Death, Forlorn in the meticulous style of drawing he discovered in Manuel Salazar’s sketchbook, watched from the studio as they staked a route from the spring’s outlet. Through the courtyard. Between the cottages. Along the path. Down the hill. Soon afterward arrived a team of Chinese ditchdiggers whose long braided hair swung like pendulums as they lifted and set aside the walkway’s paving stones. Under lines of twine the surveyors had strung to demarcate the water’s route, they broke into the hard earth with pickaxes and dug a trench, into which they laid the pipe. When they had coupled all the conduits, they joined one end to a cistern, and continued their labors on the plateau. The day the water began to surge downhill, Bloom noticed the young man walking along the line of eucalyptus with a camera case strapped across his chest and a tripod slung over his shoulder. He stopped occasionally to admire the villa, then pressed on up toward the trailhead beyond the rose garden. From where Bloom sat, this figure, dressed as he was in his elegant white suit, and carrying himself with the determination of a man dividing a throng on a city street, appeared misplaced. He moved his body with little regard for the desiccated earth that scuffed at his shoes and kicked up eddies of desert silt onto the cuffs of his pants. He obviously didn’t know or care about what fits of volatile temper this place was capable of, nor did he sense what Bloom saw from this distance, how small and insignificant his presence was on this giant rise of sediment and rock. He walked uphill with his shoulders square and his free hand thrust into his pocket, surveying the land with a keen eye, as if he were the behemoth and Mount Terminus merely a small mound of dirt, which he could flatten with the bottom of his shoe should he choose to. The intensity of spirit, this display of self-importance, disconcerted Bloom; yet, when the young man rounded the turn onto the trail, he was compelled to make himself known. He wanted to face him, to confirm what he suspected: that he and this man were somehow related. He placed aside his work and set out into the courtyard, onto the path, up onto the initial grade, and where it leveled out at a vista overlooking the plateau, Bloom came upon him standing before the camera mounted to the tripod. When the young man heard Bloom’s approach, he turned, and when he saw him, he stopped what he was doing and stared, not with the same angry glare with which he confronted the elder Rosenbloom; rather, he appeared entranced. Bloom walked on and saw before him what he had seen through the binoculars and then again through the lens of his telescope: their commonality was manifest. Here stood a man, eight or ten years older than he, strikingly similar to himself. Their faces shared the same handsome lines around the jaw and the chin. Both bore bold noses, neither too long nor too wide. Their hairline rounded high on the forehead and they each had the same Tatar curve to their eyes. Their dark complexions, the coarse texture of their hair, were identical. The hands were long and narrow to suit their tall and slender frames. Even the eyebrows contrived the same herringbone weave.

Remarkable, said the young man.

Yes, said Bloom, nodding in agreement. The young man nodded along with Bloom and then said, with the same certainty and self-possession Bloom had witnessed from the window of the studio, You’re Jacob’s son.

Yes. Joseph.

But you are called Bloom.

That’s what my father calls me.

The young man now moved away from the camera and took a step downhill. Do you know who I am?

Bloom, too, took an additional step forward. No, I don’t think so.

Simon?… Simon Reuben? He inflected the pronunciation of his name in such a way that there was an expectation Bloom should have recognized it; but he didn’t, and could only say in response that he was pleased to meet him.

You don’t recognize the name?

No, I’m afraid I don’t.

No one in the entirety of your life has ever so much as whispered my name?

No, said Bloom, never. He took another step toward the man to see if this even closer proximity would somehow enable him to recall a hidden memory. What, he asked from this short distance, should I know about you?

Why, said Simon with an edge of indignation in his voice, you should know everything about me. At the very least, you should know my name. You should have been carrying it around with you all your life. It should be filling your mind with mystery and wonder, as yours does mine.

Bloom could only shake his head. About the past, my father says very little. Almost nothing at all.

That shouldn’t surprise me, said Simon, but I find it disheartening all the same.

I don’t understand.

No, Simon said angrily, how could you?

And then arrived a pause.

The two young men, who were identical in almost every way except for their age, looked each other over for a prolonged moment in which Simon appeared, from the movement of his eyes, engaged in an internal deliberation. When he concluded this inner discourse, he regained his equanimity and said, I’m sorry, but I must be on my way. Simon Reuben lifted the tripod with the camera attached and continued charging the trail upward.

I wish you would take just a few minutes to explain.

No, said Simon from over his shoulder, it’s for your father to explain. Ask him. Ask him what became of Leah. Ask him who Leah was to your mother. Ask him how I am related to you.

Upon hearing this, Bloom set after him. Then we are related?

Ask your father.

Please try to understand, said Bloom as he ran to catch up, I will, but I assure you, nothing will come of it.

For years, Simon said, speaking to Bloom as if his concerns belonged to a world beyond the one on which they walked, I’ve been chasing the sun. Do you know what kind of displeasure it brings me to chase the sun from season to season?

I’m sorry?

Like Moses and the tribes of Israel must have felt wandering the desert. You see there, he said, pointing with the toes of the tripod in the direction of the plateau. That is my Promised Land, and today I refuse to allow God or anyone else to keep me from it. He took three long strides and then, talking more to himself than to Bloom, said, When I return, it is here that I’ll stay. No more running. When the construction is complete, I’ll return, and when I do, you and I will become better acquainted. Until then, I must continue on. Simon quickened his pace.

Please, Bloom pleaded. He’s sent me to you for the answer. I don’t have the patience to wait.

As abruptly as he had reengaged his movement up the mountain, Simon Reuben stopped, and with a plume of dust drifting beyond him, he turned back and grabbed hold of Bloom’s left hand. Look, he said as he held out his same hand, it couldn’t be more plain. On Bloom’s palm, just below his thumb, was a brown birthmark resembling a thorn growing from a stalk. On Simon’s palm, in precisely the same location, was the identical blemish.

There, he said. Take that back to him and see what he says.

Bloom looked up at the familiar face and asked in a voice upset from the unexpected turn, You are my brother?

Go home and talk with our father.

He turned again and continued his charge up the mountain. Bloom didn’t follow this time. He looked at his hand and then looked at Simon’s. He watched it clench into a fist, which he used to drive himself ahead to the appointment he was keeping with himself at the top of the trail.

*   *   *

It was almost too much for Bloom to apprehend. He had a brother? An elder brother? How was it possible he had a brother? Headstrong and ambitious. Self-absorbed and easy to anger. A man who knew something of the world. Had he not been so astounded by this revelation, he might have stopped to wonder about his father’s motives for having concealed his existence from him, but Bloom, for the time being, could only feel the preternatural thrill of the event. For the moment, he was filled with a joy he had never known before. He had a brother! An elder brother! Alive. Vibrant. Determined. Nothing else mattered to him. His only desire was to know Simon better, to stand with him when he did whatever it was he was going to do under Mount Terminus’s unyielding light.

Father! he called out when he reached the front gardens.

Father! he called again into the mazes of hedgerows.

I’ve seen him! I’ve talked with him! I’ve done as you’ve asked!

Father?

Up here, Bloom heard from above. He pitched his head back and saw the elder Rosenbloom’s profile edge out over the rail of the tower’s arcade. I am here, my dear.

I’ll come to you! And on Bloom continued in his enlivened state to the tower stairs. When he had climbed to the pavilion’s landing, he discovered his father standing before the telescope, its small aperture pointing to the slope Bloom had just descended. Jacob’s eyes wouldn’t turn to his son; they gazed out in the same direction as the hollowed tube. He looked off into the distance as if he were still imagining the dramatic turn on the mountainside. Bloom was accustomed to his father’s reserved silences, but this reticence to engage him he had never before encountered. His remove unnerved Bloom, and he couldn’t help but wonder if by doing what his father had asked, he had somehow betrayed him; if by allowing himself to experience the quiver of exultation he felt in his joy, had he in some way breached the elder Rosenbloom’s trust?

Father?

With his eyes still unable to look onto his son, Jacob said in a plaintive voice, The two of you, you’re nearly one and the same.

Yes, said Bloom in a tone now matching his father’s.

Yes, Jacob repeated, nearly one and the same. He nodded as a philosopher might when formulating a complicated course of logic. After a long silence, he turned, not to Bloom, but in the direction of the sea, and said, I’ve envisioned this day many times, you know. And each time I’ve lived this moment in my mind, I’ve never been able to move beyond this point in the conversation. You and I have often stood together in these temporal events of mine, very much as we are right now, and they’ve all concluded with the same result. Always we end as participants in a stillborn scene, one in which I’m unable to form the words of the story I must tell you. And here I am, paralyzed by the same hesitation, the same reluctance to say what I must say.

Please, Father, said Bloom. I must know. It’s time I knew.

Jacob looked into his son’s eyes for a few moments, almost as if he were bidding him farewell, then said, Come along.

*   *   *

In the drawing room that afternoon, the elder Rosenbloom placed in his son’s hands a photograph and said, Tell me what you see. Bloom took the silver plate from him and saw on it a lustrous image of his young mother standing on either side of his father. Two mothers, each holding one of his father’s arms. Is it an illusion? asked Bloom.

No, it isn’t an illusion. On my left arm is your mother, Rachel. And on my right is her sister, Leah.

One was indistinguishable from the other. They were identical in every way. With no trace of a physical inconsistency. Pointing to Leah’s image, Jacob said, This is Simon’s mother. And Bloom now understood his father’s hesitation in the tower. He now comprehended his unease, as he could hear a disquieting voice emerge within his mind, one calling into question everything he once thought he knew about the man who had fathered him. It was as if a mask had been lifted, revealing to him a face with which he wasn’t at all familiar.

Jacob reached for the pouch of tobacco on the table beside his chair and with trembling hands packed the bowl of his pipe. With your mother’s sister, he said, with Leah, I had a son. And before there could be any recriminations, Jacob began at the beginning. He told Bloom of the obscure origin of his, his mother’s, and his aunt’s birth, of their epic journey to and across the sea. He told him of the old Rabbi Rosenbloom and his wife, the life he, Rachel, and Leah shared at the orphanage. He described the day he learned they were lost to him, the years he apprenticed with Jonah Liebeskind, the circumstances in which he and Rachel found each other again. He told Bloom about his mother and his aunt’s estrangement, how, together, he and Rachel searched out Leah. He recounted their happy reunion, the happy wedding, how content they felt upon their move to Woodhaven. He told Bloom the tale of Leah’s deception, detailed the extent to which her betrayal destroyed his mother’s spirit, described how devastated Rachel was when she received the announcement of Simon’s birth, set out the order of events that led to Leah’s death, to his mother’s descent into madness, revealed to Bloom the identity of the man he had met at the sanitarium on the beach, explained to him how Simon had come to be in Samuel Freed’s care.

They moved from the drawing room to the dining room, and Jacob continued to speak through dinner, during which time he chronicled for Bloom the history of Samuel Freed’s extortion.

*   *   *

Some days after Leah died, Jacob told him, Sam Freed arranged for his men to meet him at his bank. On that day, Jacob provided them a large sum of money, more than enough, he thought, to provide for Simon’s care for an entire lifetime. He thought, perhaps, that would be the extent of it. The following year, however, and every year afterward on the anniversary of Leah’s death, Freed demanded more, and, having no recourse, Jacob provided him larger and larger amounts of money. With this money, he learned, Sam Freed was purchasing a great many burlesque and vaudeville houses throughout the city, and from all accounts Freed’s fortunes rose. The theaters flourished and Freed prospered greatly, particularly after he had gathered his theatrical talent, hired photographers, and put them to work in an open-air studio on the riverfront.

There they made dozens of short pictures. Novelty acts mostly. Dancing bears. Sword swallowers. Circus freaks. Sideshow featurettes, he called them. Freed purchased Kinetoscopes from the Edison Manufacturing Company, which he lined up in the lobbies of his theaters, and in his new machines he presented his productions. He was so impressed by the return on his investment, he started converting his theaters into motion picture palaces. He realized if he could make his pictures last the duration of a theatrical performance, he could run them through the day and late into the night, and collect a continuous source of revenue at a fraction of the expense of putting on live acts.

When Edison Studios learned Sam Freed had gone into the picture business, they started after him for unfair use of their equipment. Freed simply did what every other production company did: he sent his crew off to traverse country byways and make pictures out of the reach of Edison’s lawyers. Soon enough, it became apparent to him, he could further cut his costs if he had a fixed base of operation. He wanted to eliminate the fees his itinerants were laying out to local townships—the bribes paid to politicians, the location payments made to property owners, the rates for lodging and food. He realized his overhead would be significantly lower if they consolidated everyone in one place and remained stationary on a single plot of land. It just so happened, at the time he began to dream of a permanent place in the sun, he sent his men to collect his annual alms from me, but on the day they arrived at the bank, they discovered I wasn’t there. Mother had already passed away, and seeing as Freed no longer had any leverage over us, I no longer had cause to continue paying him.

When they saw Jacob wasn’t at the bank, the elder Rosenbloom explained, Freed’s men went to the house in Woodhaven, where they saw Bloom and his father board a carriage bound for the train station. They followed them there, and, after making a few inquiries, learned where they were going. Freed sent a telegram to one of his production teams, and they sent the three men who had been observing them. They reported back about what was on Mount Terminus—open land drenched in light, coastal desert kept alive by an eternal spring—and not long after that, they learned about Jacob’s holdings at the lake up near Mojave. Several times they approached Jacob in town and tried to influence him to sign over a portion of the Mount Terminus property and the water rights to the lake. They threatened to implicate him in Leah’s death in place of Rachel. But Jacob refused to give in to their pressure. They eventually offered him money for both the land and access to the water, and he refused them still, as he couldn’t imagine parting with either property for the sentimental reasons that precipitated him to purchase them in the first place.

But as I watched you grow older and more self-aware, said the elder Rosenbloom, the more I was reminded of the loneliness I knew as a child, and the more I recalled the longing I felt to be rejoined with your mother and her sister, the need I felt to be reconnected to the only true family I had ever known. And the more I was reminded of the routines in which I had cycled through alone for such a long period of time, the more insurmountable the regret I felt for having concealed from you that you had a brother, the more I regretted and reproached myself for having abandoned Simon to my blackmailer. I no longer could pretend I had done something noble by sacrificing my child for your mother’s welfare. I could no longer ignore the truth. Without a struggle, without voicing any opposition, I’d deposited an innocent child, my own flesh and blood, into the hands of an unscrupulous thug whose only motive for wanting the boy was to harm me, and your mother, for the roles we played in Leah’s death. I could no longer ignore the fact that I owed Simon more than I could possibly provide him. There was no material recompense adequate enough. And so, in the end, I agreed to provide him, not Freed, the land and the water rights to bring the two of you together and help him realize his dreams.

Which are what? asked Bloom.

Pictures, said Jacob. He makes pictures. And down there, he will be able to do as he pleases. With you. If that’s what you wish.

But why sacrifice the lake?

Because he has plans for it. But, more important, because he knows what it means to me.

*   *   *

When the elder Rosenbloom had finished his confession, he fell quiet for a long while, presumably waiting for Bloom’s response. Bloom could see in his father’s face that he needed him to express some assurance that he’d one day find it within himself to accept the complicated history of their family and forgive him. But, as Jacob rightly anticipated when imagining this moment all these years, Bloom found himself caught in a schism taking shape in his mind. On the one hand, he was filled with compassion and pity for his father. He had seen in what ways the great abyss at the core of his story had taken its toll on him. For this reason Bloom was compelled to find words to comfort him. But he couldn’t. What, after all, did one say to the figure of such a tragedy? How did one console a Hamlet or a Lear or an Othello? Even if he could find the right words, he wondered if he’d share them. He couldn’t help but ask himself if the preservation of his memories, of the way Bloom perceived him and his mother, was reason enough to conceal from him the fact that Simon existed, that Bloom wasn’t alone in the world. Certainly he would have been capable of forgiving his mother’s frailties, of comprehending the circumstances surrounding the choice his father was forced to make. But now he couldn’t help but think selfishly, of what had been lost to him in the passage of time. For the entirety of his life, he had a brother, and knew nothing of him, not even his name. And when he reflected on this, Bloom wasn’t convinced there was a sensible explanation sufficient to provide this episode a heartening conclusion. He had never before felt distrustful of his father. He had never before thought it was possible he would give him cause to feel this way. But he had. He had deceived him. Intentionally designed an illusion in which he had been dwelling for the entirety of his life.

There were a great number of thoughts and emotions Bloom wanted to express, none of which squared with the relationship he had had with Jacob. No words he possessed could properly articulate his disappointment, his confusion, his anger. All he could think to do, therefore, was contain his true sentiments and say what he would have said on some other occasion preceding this one, one with which he was more familiar. In a controlled manner, with as much hope in his voice as he could summon, Bloom said, We’ll find our way past this.

Will we? said Jacob circumspectly.

Yes, said Bloom. We will. I’m certain of it.

Unable to say anything more than this, Bloom backed away from his father. At the door, he turned and climbed the stairs to his bedroom, inside which he stared out the window into the night sky and in it he saw the nightmare of miniatures his mother had painted for his father’s devices, his mother running from Leah’s shadow, on her knees before her, begging for forgiveness, and he recalled more clearly the emptiness in her eyes when he was a young child. He could see now, they were the eyes of a woman whose heart had been irreparably harmed, whose spirit had been crushed by her own hand. So devastated, he thought, not even the abiding love of a child, Bloom’s love, could repair it.

*   *   *

For almost a year, the top of Mount Terminus filled with industry. In Simon’s absence, concrete poured into foundations, lumber arrived by the cartload, plumbers and electricians, carpenters and masons overtook the camps, and while they remained in residence, geometric skeletons cast higher and longer shadows onto the mountain. Technicians erected poles along the edge of the road and connected them with high-tension wire spun out from man-sized spools. After some time, the glow of electrified light illuminated the night sky a bright hue of orange, so that from Bloom’s bedroom window it appeared as if the sun were always about to rise over the ridge.

Ever since the night Jacob had recounted the circumstances that led him to abandon Simon, Jacob, perhaps out of respect for Bloom’s need to absorb what he had learned, perhaps because he sensed in what way Bloom’s estimation of him had been lowered, perhaps so as not to burden his son any further, removed himself to seclusion and returned to his routines. He returned to his gardens, where, to dull the noise of the construction, he stuffed tufts of cotton into his ears, and when he could no longer stand even the muted drumbeat of labor echoing from the plateau, he locked himself away for the remainder of the day in the gallery, where, as a form of penance, Bloom speculated, he stared into his mother’s Woodhaven landscapes to recall his wife gazing vacantly at the countryside without seeing its beauty or feeling the possibility of its sanctuary, seeing, rather, visions of her sister. In the gallery, the elder Rosebloom drank. From Manuel Salazar’s chamber Bloom watched him drink until he could drink no more, and as the construction beat on, as its noise continued to disturb his father’s communion with the two women he’d loved since before he could remember being alive, as the sounds of the pneumatic drills bored deeper into his interior, he visited the gallery earlier and earlier, oftentimes falling unconscious well before the sun dipped below the horizon.

Bloom witnessed his father surrender. In the furrows of his brow, in the gauntness of his cheeks, in the dark depressions under his eyes. He could clearly see drain from the elder Rosenbloom’s body what remained of its vitality. It was as if the telling of his story had released him from his obligation to his son. It was the withholding of this information, it occurred to Bloom, that motivated Jacob to keep on living, and now that it had been released, the largest artery of his spirit had been depleted, the reason for his being, exhausted, and to watch him fade, without a glimmer of resistance, unsettled Bloom. He didn’t know what to do. He had grown accustomed to the oblivion in which his father had dwelled for so long, an oblivion that now seemed to him mild compared with this one. He couldn’t fathom the rate of such an unnatural decline. In less than six months, his father appeared to have aged ten years. His life no longer nurtured the gardens in which he dwelled; rather, it leeched into them, drained into the soil holding firm the roots of the hedgerows. He grew so feeble, Bloom was afraid to leave him alone at night. He feared he would set himself on fire with his pipe’s burning cherry of tobacco, that he would, perhaps, take a drunken tumble down the stairs, or worse, stumble upon the courage to exact his own destruction.

When the elder Rosenbloom entered the gallery in the late afternoons, the younger Rosenbloom climbed to the heights of Salazar’s chamber, where, sitting across from Cyclops and before the dim reflection of the projection table, he kept a watchful eye. He watched and labored on the illustrations of Death, Forlorn, hoping he could prove his devotion through the dedication of his work, his exacting lines. He thought, surely this would show him he was still loved and needed by Bloom, that his presence continued to fortify him. Perhaps then he would return to him, if not in full measure, as some small fraction of a man. And so the younger Rosenbloom worked through the nights with Salazar’s journal by his side, learning from his hand how to draw strong, flowing lines and embed detail into his compositions in such a way his father would feel as awestruck as Bloom felt the first time he set his eyes upon Salazar’s pages.

During the day, he now refused to leave his father’s side. He took Roya by the hand and led her to the gardens, where amid the hammering of the construction, he sat with her in case he could no longer fight his fatigue. And it was here, when Bloom’s face had begun to resemble what it would look like when he became a man, Roya reached out and pressed into his hand a note that read, in her childlike script, I will watch over him. She then reached out and took the younger Rosenbloom by the neck and placed his head on her thighs, at which point she opened a second note and placed it in front of his eyes. It read: Now sleep. Roya’s palm pressed itself against Bloom’s ear, and the world grew silent, and Bloom slept. And every day afterward he slept with his nose buried in the pungent scent of Roya’s lap.

*   *   *

On the sixth morning of Yamim Noraim, just as the autumnal winds began to blow, the team of craftsmen put the finishing touches on their work. By the afternoon, when the gales began to howl their fiercest, the last of them departed, leaving behind an arrangement of unremarkable architecture. Out of the materials that had traveled such a great distance to the top of Mount Terminus, they formed a cul de sac at the plateau’s far end. At its center, some form of French chateau with an odd configuration of asymmetrical towers and spires. On either side of this huddled a colorful collection of smaller-scale construction, an incongruent assortment of Samoan huts, Tudor cottages, a Rhine castle, odd little shacks with domes and minarets, all built up with plaster, lath, and paper. Where the long stretch of property abutted the mountainside, they had built two sizable warehouses whose roofs were lined with skylights. Across the road from these structures were a dozen wooden stages with latticed roofs. It all amounted to a small settlement. Seventeen buildings in all. Impressive to the eye only insofar as it was something of a monstrosity, a pastiche conceived in a mind holding little regard for balance or symmetry.

When the last of the tools had sounded, and the last of the workmen had departed, the elder Rosenbloom left his garden and joined Bloom at the overlook. For the first time since the start of the construction, Jacob looked down onto the land he had provided his estranged son, and upon seeing what had been built, he said with a brave smile, I hope you will try to find your place there. Bloom could see his father’s eyes dampen in this instance, and he thought for a moment he was going to reach out and pull him into his chest the way he did when Bloom was small, but just as a tear had welled with enough volume to fall onto his cheek, his father turned and walked away. He meandered through the avocado grove, brushing his long fingers over a burr forming on the trunk of a male tree whose flowers had wilted, and every few paces thereafter, he bent down under the limbs of a female and lifted from the ground her blackened, withered fruit. And when his thin arms bulged with misshapen avocados, he returned to his garden’s labyrinth, where he would stare into the leafy eyes of his topiary for the last time.

*   *   *

Jacob didn’t return to the house at the wane of day. As he did every year on this sixth day of Yamim Noraim, he collected the trimmings he had cut from his topiary and bundled them in twine; he unearthed the juniper saplings he had planted the year before, gathered his candles and his lanterns, the jug of water and sack of oats, and carried his cargo to the stables. On this third twilight before the Day of Atonement, however, he remained in the gardens after the sun set, and continued to stay there into the night. He refused Meralda’s overtures to come in for the dinner that would fortify him for his fast, and he refused her again later when she begged him to take shelter from the winds. Bloom watched over Jacob from the tower’s pavilion until a dry electrical storm cracked the black glass of the sky. He descended the tower stairs and walked out into the flashing light, to where Jacob knelt at the feet of the sculpted shrub staring out over the promontory. Please, Father, he said, the storm. He took his father by the hand and tugged at the weight of his arm. The elder Rosenbloom wouldn’t lift his head to look at his son, but with his eyes turned away, he rose to his feet and allowed himself to be led away. Bloom sat him down in the drawing room and poured him a drink, which he placed into his father’s hand. He then ran upstairs to the gallery and retrieved his pipe and pouch of tobacco. When he returned to the parlor, he emptied the bowl the way he had observed his father do it so many times before, with three gentle taps to the side of the silver tray. He dipped his fingers into the pouch and pinched enough of the moist leaves to fill the pipe; he struck a match and puffed at the lip—three small kisses—then sucked in his cheeks in the same manner his father did when he breathed the smoke into his body. When the burning smoke hit the back of his throat, he wanted to cough it out, but he suppressed the urge—no more than a hiccup sounded from him—and he blew out a steady stream, did it again, this time allowing the smoke to enter into him without so much as a sniffle.

This performance of Bloom’s amused his father. With the most melancholy of eyes and the most joyful of smiles, he said, You have been watching me, I see.

Yes, said Bloom as he placed the pipe into his father’s palm.

Joseph Rosenbloom, said his father, look at you. You’ve become a man.

Yes, Father.

Yes, my dear. Yes, indeed.

Bloom removed his father’s shoes and tucked a blanket around his legs. A loud clap of thunder rattled the windows, and when it quieted, Bloom knelt beside the elder Rosenbloom and said, Father, I worry about you.

His father tried to hold Bloom’s gaze, but he couldn’t. He tried to find the courage to say what Bloom needed to hear, but he could only say with his son’s face so near to his, My dear Joseph. My gift from God. And the elder Rosenbloom could say no more.

Please, said Bloom, don’t leave until morning. If you leave in the morning, I will go with you, as always.

Jacob smiled at his son and drank down his brandy, and with his sunken eyes, he looked up at Bloom, and Bloom without saying another word stood up, took the tumbler from his father’s hand, and poured him another drink, thinking if he could get him drunk enough, he would fall asleep in his chair and be safe until the storm passed. And then it occurred to him how he might do just this. Don’t move, said Bloom. I have a gift for you. And Bloom ran off again, this time to the library, where he retrieved the magic lantern and the box of slides on which he had been laboring. He unpacked the magic lantern and set it up on the table behind his father’s chair. He then lit the lantern’s lamp and extinguished the lights of the drawing room. You recall, said Bloom, you asked me some time ago to illustrate Death, Forlorn?

I do, yes.

I’d like to share it with you now, if I may.

Please do.

Bloom opened the wooden box and removed the first slide, that of the couple standing under a wedding chuppah, gazing into each other’s eyes. He slipped it into the slot before the flame and removed the lens cap to reveal his mother and his father.

Look how beautiful you’ve made us. Jacob turned his face to the light, and there Bloom saw the pride in his eyes. I have never seen such lines, he said. Never. He blinked, and blinked again, then returned his gaze to the image, and on Bloom went through the entire box, and when he was through and had brightened the lights, his father wept openly in front of him for the first time since his mother died.

*   *   *

That night the desert winds mixed with storm clouds from the sea. They gathered over the great basin and pressed their combined forces onto Mount Terminus. Bloom sat beside his father, filled his glass several more times, and together, in silence, they listened to the intemperate mood of the world. A hard driving rain began to lash at the villa, and when it did, the lines that had etched themselves onto his father’s brow and around the corners of his eyes appeared to soften, and Bloom was able to see in him an image of the much younger, more vibrant man they had just observed in his slides, an image in which his father’s features were still fine, in which he wore a suit and tie, his hair slicked back, his fingernails buffed, his shoes shined. His father soon dozed off, and when he did, a calm came over Bloom, and in that calm, he felt weary. He dimmed the lights of the parlor to a blue glow and, for the first time in a long time, he retired to his bed, where he counted the passing seconds between the lightning flashes that brightened his room and the thunderclaps that followed them. And as the storm began to subside, he drifted off to sleep.

*   *   *

The sun had long since risen when Bloom was startled awake by an explosion of shattering glass. A paroxysm of wind had blown one of his bedroom windows around the axis of its hinges to crash against the wall. The young man dressed and put on his shoes. He walked over the glimmering shards to discover the latch had snapped. The rain had ceased and the skies had cleared. The fiery desert heat, it appeared, had overpowered the moisture from the sea. Bloom looked out over the courtyard and down the path of paving stones under which their water now flowed, and there he saw an odd sight. He saw their mare attempting to shake off a long rope lassoed to its neck. With the rope dragging under her, the mare galloped up the path and through the pergola and came to a halt at the reflecting pool. She looked up at Bloom and for a long time stared at him with obsidian eyes, then as quickly as she approached, she turned and galloped off in the direction from which she came. When Bloom saw her turn toward the front of the estate, he ran down the landing, calling out to his father. He ran downstairs and into the parlor, where he had left him. Jacob’s blanket had been pushed aside, the tumbler from which he drank, with which Bloom had plied him with drink, the pipe, were just where the young Rosenbloom had left them, but no father. Meralda called out from the kitchen, asking what had happened, but Bloom ignored her and ran out onto the drive and into the maze of the garden, calling out at every turn, Father! and when he reached the plots in the garden where the elder Rosenbloom had appointed his topiary, Bloom discovered, with a deepening sense of dread, that each figure his father had spent perfecting all these years, each and every figure he had communed with in his irreparable state of grief, had been irreparably damaged. Their limbs torn from their torsos. Their torsos torn at the waist. Their heads severed at the neck. When he exited the maze of the first garden, he entered the maze of the second and found the same devastation. Father! he called out. And when he exited this garden, he noticed the mare standing on the promontory. She no longer was trying to shake herself free from her rope. She just stood there, her long neck tipping into the ravine. Bloom approached the mare with some caution, and when he had reached her, he saw the outer edge of the headland had fallen away. He advanced toward the precipice and looked down, and there he saw some twenty yards into the chasm a deposit of mud mixed with brush and rock, and rising up out of this, a shoulder and an outstretched arm, both of which remained perfectly still. As soon as he comprehended what he was looking at and what had happened, Bloom averted his eyes, and when he did, he noticed, standing beside a motorcar at a turn on the road, the three men in dark long coats holding against their chests their bowler hats.

He should have wanted to scream out at them, to curse them, shame them, chase them down, but he couldn’t, he simply couldn’t, and not because he was afraid, rather, because contrary to what he was supposed to have felt at this moment in which his worst fear had been made real, he was overtaken by a profound feeling of release. He could feel the intensity of his father’s torment lift. He could sense it being swept out to sea by the desert winds. Vaporized by the heat. It was wrong, it was all wrong, but Bloom, who was, indeed, doing his best to struggle against this deviant emotion, couldn’t help himself.

The euphoria outweighed him.