PART V

PARADISE

 

 

 

When the Mount Terminus subdivision opened, fighter pilots recently returned from the war flew planes in formation across the basin and performed feats of aerial acrobatics. Simon, in the company of councilmen, the governor, and members of the water authority, stood before a fountain at the edge of the bluff, and there Bloom’s brother proclaimed this the beginning of a new era, at which point water sprang forth from the fountain’s spigots and arced high overhead. That evening, while in the same company, Simon lifted a switch on a transformer box, and with it, all the land for as far as all could see illuminated. Street after street, incandescent light shone atop poles, out windows, onto billboards advertising soap and beauty products and Mount Terminus pictures. Rockets shrieked from the earth and exploded into sparkling bouquets over clay tiles topping the roofs, reflected from the boulevard’s office building windows, onto the eyes of pilgrims who had driven in to take in the spectacle. There seemed to be a ceaseless supply of incendiaries. The sky burst open over the development into the early hours of the next morning; over the stages and warehouses of the new studio the pyrotechnics continued to brighten the sky until the sun broke the day. When the light show had ceased, Bloom drove with Simon to the new lot, and there, before he opened it to the employees and the public, Simon walked Bloom through streets and town squares, past far-flung places Bloom would likely never visit, and he was amazed by what he saw, and he was amazed at what his brother had accomplished. It was all too big for words. It was as if Simon truly were some modern pharaoh or emperor, some ancient warlord philosopher king. He had built here a small city within the city, and with the size and scope of his endeavor a testament to his power and vision, he easily attracted talent from the East, new directors, actors, writers, photographers, technicians, so many, in fact, Simon said he would need to appoint an army of stage managers to commandeer the new personnel. No longer would he be seen on his porch conducting the action of the studio. No longer, Bloom presumed, would he be seen at all. It was one thing to know the enormity of a man’s ambition, another altogether to witness that ambition realized. Simon’s achievement radiated out over the wires, and as news of opportunity at the studio, on the land here and in the valley, spread in the weeks that followed, more and more pilgrims arrived. Cars streamed in from downtown, from the desert, from remote places in the mountains, the outer reaches of the valleys. People en masse massed in the streets. Everywhere. Simply to see. To be part of history. To behold Simon’s achievement. Even the malcontents from Pacheta Lake were present, but perhaps because the festivities were so popular and lively, they didn’t dare disrupt them. They did, however, make their attendance known. Dozens of them formed a quiet protest on the periphery of the fountain, at the gates of the studio, and with the grimmest of faces, they silently held up signs of protest—Ignore Us At Your Peril; We Will Be Heard; Just When You Least Expect It, You’ll Know Who We Are—and were bullied away by the police into paddy wagons. When the energy of all was finally spent and the stretch of land had quieted, moving trucks rolled in, and the men and women who had purchased their new homes from Simon’s real estate company settled, and soon Bloom saw take life the map his brother had kept in his mother’s shrine. The entire basin, it appeared to Bloom, grew more and more green and colorful by the day, and it continued to phosphoresce at night, a shade of violet, or was it lavender, and the stars, he could have sworn, had begun to dim. On nights that held a chill in the air, a scrim of smoke blanketed the pale blue light, and if the current of wind swept in from the ocean, it could lift the sweet smell of burning wood as high as Mount Terminus’s peak. They were there. Always there. Their cars roaming the streets. Their trams crating them back and forth to and from the heart of the city. An occasional siren crying a sorrowful wail.

*   *   *

As much as Bloom admired his brother’s achievement, he took comfort knowing a boundary was drawn around his ambition at the base of Mount Terminus. And while he felt a dull ache when the members of the colony departed the plateau for homes on the grid, he mostly felt relief to see them go, including Simon, who had built a sizable home on a fine piece of property that elevated him just high enough to appreciate the entire stretch of land he had developed. The plateau from hereon would remain largely unused. Except on the rare occasion—when the stages and studios of Mount Terminus Productions were overbooked—it was Bloom’s to do with as he pleased. It afforded him the time and silence to continue working at an unhurried pace on The Death of Paradise. It provided him the right set of circumstances to meticulously re-create under the warehouse skylights the rooms of the villa as he imagined they had been when Fernando and Miranda, Manuel and Adora occupied them. Every now and again, he called on the aid of Hershel Verbinsky and Hannah Edelstein. He mailed them designs for furniture and art, odds and ends, and, on occasion, asked for a helping hand. Usually, however, he relied on Roya to keep him company, sometimes Gus, who helped with heavy lifting, and every now and again, Gottlieb, when his mood and schedule allowed it. Simon had offered the plateau to Bloom and his mentor, to make it their own personal domain, but Gottlieb was fonder of people than Bloom had realized. He couldn’t properly be himself if he wasn’t being a nuisance. To feel relevant, he told Bloom, he needed to be in the company of people who properly loathed him. If he wasn’t agitating his colleagues, he didn’t consider himself fully alive. Bloom, who possessed his own idiosyncratic methods, albeit antithetical to Gottlieb’s, understood. He often wished he were equipped to contend with Simon and Gottlieb’s boisterous world, but if his time on Santa Ynez had taught him anything, he knew he was better disposed to living his life apart, as his father had done, as his mother had done. Upon his returns from Santa Ynez, he often envisioned raising the walls of the estate higher and higher, so high his view from the top of the tower would become obstructed. He dreamed at times of encircling the gardens and the grove behind such a wall, and cutting himself off completely, forever, with little more than a slot through which he could receive the most essential things. He would have been perfectly fulfilled living such a life with Roya, Meralda, and Gus. And when these figments passed, he thought, perhaps after he had completed The Death of Paradise, he would make it so. Cut himself off. For good.

And why not?… What, after all, did he have to offer anyone? Like Death, like Jacob, like the earliest inhabitants of Mount Terminus, his fate, it seemed, was sealed. God had sealed him into the Book of Life with the mark of misery and sorrow. What good was it to fight against it any longer?

*   *   *

Bloom spent some months trying to work out the details of the Mount Terminus massacre, and for months he felt his attempts a failure. He wanted more than anything else to portray Don Fernando as the monster he was, but he worried that if he provided him the camera’s point of view, he could very easily turn him into a conquering hero. He attempted, therefore, to frame the atrocity from Manuel’s innocent and observant point of view, as his perspective seemed more compatible with the truth Bloom wanted to show. But knowing what he knew of Manuel Salazar now, of his craven self-interest, of his cowardly disregard for the woman he claimed to love, he didn’t wish for the audience to mistake his sensitivity as an artist as a form of romantic nobility. He began to recall the conversations he had with Dr. Straight on the subject of nationalism and tribalism, of defining the enemy as something other than human, and it eventually occurred to Bloom, this scene’s success—if he was to get to its essential truth—was dependent on a shifting perspective. If his intent was to charge Fernando as a monster, Manuel as an unwitting accomplice, he must humanize the people whose lives they and the church destroyed, and so he went back in time to the images he drew for Jacob in their early days on Mount Terminus, the ones in which he included his mother as a participant in the mountain’s idyllic past, and he decided to make the conquered, not the conquerors, the centerpiece of this movement. As soon as Fernando disgraced himself in Spain, was ordered into exile by the king, put aboard the ship bound for the New World, he would cut away to the spring on Mount Terminus, and dwell there with the children hanging from the limbs of the oak trees, with the men spearfishing in the sea, with the women tending to the fires and preparing for the feasts and the celebrations. Here he would allow the light to shine, here he would make these people as real as Eduardo and Estella were real, and he would show his audience who the true barbarians were, and what darkness they carried in their hearts.

When this idea took hold, Bloom began drawing throughout the days and late into the nights. He relived his earliest days on Mount Terminus and re-created the world he had imagined as a child, the images he had captured in his waking dreams. And on one such night when he attempted to retrieve from his memory an image of his mother, to see her living within the long-lost Arcadia, he paused for a moment and looked out his studio window, into the courtyard, where he saw a dark figure returning his gaze. It stood still for a moment and then walked off in the direction of the cottages. He thought perhaps it was Roya, but Roya, he recalled, had long since turned in for the night. Perhaps he saw nothing at all? He shut off the light so he could better see into the dim light of the courtyard, and now he observed the same dark figure walk under the toupee of bougainvillea atop the pergola. Bloom hurried out the studio door, down the steps into the courtyard, and he followed the figure into the grove, where he glimpsed a slim wisp of a woman’s silhouette enter the rose garden. He called out a hello, but there was no sign of her. He continued on to the garden’s center, through the passages cutting across the concentric circles, and when he reached the glowing limbs of the enraptured couple sleeping the Sleep of Death, there, sitting on the bench set opposite Jacob’s grave, in the glow of moonlight reflecting off the statuary marble, was Isabella, the sight of whom caused Bloom’s body to behave in an involuntary manner, one not conducive to sustaining consciousness. His extremities started to tingle, as did the very follicles attaching his hair to his scalp. The scent of the air sweetened, and then the moon’s silvery glow grayed and eventually filled with an inky darkness.

*   *   *

When Bloom started to come to, he felt his head resting in the warmth of a lap and a hand stroking his cheek. Again his thoughts turned to Roya, but when he opened his eyes, he found what was unmistakably Isabella’s face in the darkness, and he thought of his mother searching the windows for an image of Leah, and he thought of the images he saw of her being chased by the phantasm of her dead sister. He reached for the hand running down his cheek and felt its form, its fingers, its bones, and he said to himself, I’ve gone mad.

No, Joseph, you haven’t gone mad.

But you’re dead.

No, I’m here, said Isabella, here with you.

She sounded weak, like an imprint of a life, as if something inside the very core of her had been torn apart. She reached for Bloom’s hand and raised it to her mouth, and she blew her breath onto it. She then pulled his palm to her breast so Bloom could feel the faint beat of her heart.

See?

It’s not possible, thought Bloom. He lifted himself up and turned to her.

But your letter …

What letter?

The one you carried with you. The one sealed with the drawings I sent before you departed.

But that letter was lost.

No, said Bloom. No, it wasn’t.

No?

No. For almost two years I’ve been mourning your death.

Two years?

Yes, said Bloom. Two awful years.

It never occurred to me that letter could have found its way to you. If I had thought it even remotely possible …

Her voice dropped off, and Bloom could hear what a struggle it was for Isabella to contend with such a strong emotion. After a long moment of silence, Isabella collected herself, and said, Joseph …

Yes?

Will you please do something for me?

What’s that?

Pretend with me, for just a little while, that I never left. Please, can we act as we once did? With the same familiarity? With the same tenderness?

Bloom could again hear in the hollowness of Isabella’s voice the echo of something horrible, and he knew whatever had happened to her was far graver than the misery he had suffered when he thought she was lost to him. He was compelled to share with her how bereft he had been, to tell her what it was like for him after he read what was contained in her package. He wanted to tell her how changed he was by the news it carried, how changed he was by his visits to Santa Ynez. For a moment he wondered how he could possibly pretend to be the same man Isabella had loved. He was no longer that person. He had been drained of hope. Grieved. Mourned. Fallen to despair. He had come to adore another woman, a woman who helped reconstitute and renew his spirit. Her companionship had fundamentally changed him. He wanted to say it all, but as they stood up and started walking in the direction of the courtyard, he could see in the glow of light emanating from the house how thin and frail Isabella had become, and when he walked her inside and sat her down in the parlor, he saw to what extent her once vibrant eyes had lost their vitality. A thick fog had settled within them. And when he began to comprehend what hopeless state she was in, he said, My dear Isabella, there’s no reason to pretend. I’m still the same man. The very same. And then he asked if she would let him call a doctor for her.

She gently took his hand and said, Please, Joseph. As if I never left.

All right, Bloom agreed. As if you’d never left. At which point it occurred to him to take her to the library. He guided her up the stairs by the arm, and when they entered the room she and Dr. Straight inhabited for the months they were on the estate, he said, There, see, as if you were here only yesterday.

The smallest glimmer of life appeared in the corners of Isabella’s eyes. She approached the light cabinet and ran her fingers over the rivulets of wax in Walgensten’s lantern.

I didn’t have the heart to move it.

Isabella returned to Bloom and pressed her gaunt cheek to his chest. May I sit in here alone for a few moments?

Of course. Bloom left her, but before he walked off into the hall, he observed her face and saw how absent of color and expression it was. However upsetting he found her condition, however impossible the actuality of her return seemed to him, however much he continued to question whether or not the experience he was having was, in fact, taking place, or if he had gone truly mad, he did as he promised he’d do. He let her be without questions. He found her belongings in the foyer—her valise and a trunk—and carried them to the cottage in which she resided when she was last on the estate, and he set them before the bed. He was tempted for a moment to search for clues within them, to see if he could puzzle together where she had been and what she had been through, but he restrained himself. Rather, he left her things alone and descended into the cellar, and climbed the rungs of the ladder to Manuel’s chamber, and climbed down the rungs of the ladder to Manuel’s labyrinthine passages, followed Ariadne’s thread to the eye of the Minotaur, to Adora’s tomb, and he watched Isabella sit in the library. She hadn’t moved. Not a muscle. She sat upright, staring at the white sheet she and Dr. Straight had used to screen Gaspard’s slides. For nearly a half hour he observed her sit as stiff as death, at which time Bloom couldn’t take it anymore. He returned to her and, without a word, lifted her up in his arms, carried her to the cottage, and settled her into bed. He then sat through the night in the courtyard trying to believe it was true, wondering if he had somehow conjured her spirit to return to him during those nights spent with Estella, those nights he called out Isabella’s name into the caws and squawks of Eduardo’s shuffling birds. Throughout the night, he periodically stood up to look in, to see if her body was still at rest on the cottage’s bed. Throughout the night, he sat and asked himself if this was how his mother had begun to see Leah when she was alert and awake. He felt himself at the precipice of madness all night, until early the following morning Meralda discovered him sitting upright in his chair, staring at the cottage’s exterior, and asked him what in the world was he doing out here, and Bloom said, Please go to the window of the cottage and tell me what you see. Meralda asked what had gotten into him, and Bloom asked once again for her to do as he asked. She walked to the cottage window, and when she returned, she said, Is it her? Is it really her?

You see her, then? She is there?

Yes. She is there. Asleep in her bed.

You’re certain?

Meralda clutched hold of Bloom and said, Yes! She is there. In one piece. Asleep. Dreaming. Waiting to awake to see you. And then Bloom’s cook proclaimed it a miracle his angel had returned to her dear boy. Thank you, she said to the heavens, crossing herself. Please, may she bring him peace and joy.

*   *   *

Bloom and Isabella dined together in the early evenings, and then quietly walked through the hedgerows of the front gardens. For several weeks, they continued on in the same silence to which they had, in gradations, grown accustomed on Isabella’s previous visit, but what Bloom once found deeply comforting then, he now considered unnatural. He wanted to talk, to know where she had been and what events had taken shape to so dramatically change her. He didn’t want to put on this charade; yet he didn’t have the heart to disappoint her. They kept to their regimen, until one night—when, Bloom noticed, Isabella appeared to have regained the smallest fraction of her luster—she finally spoke and asked him to tell her what he had done with himself since their last correspondence. If for no other reason than to hear something occupy their silence, Bloom took his time recounting for her the changes he had witnessed take place on the stretch of land leading to the sea. And because he had few of his own stories he could share that didn’t in some way relate to her, he talked of Simon. About the scope of vision, the enormity of his will. She asked about Death, Forlorn, and he recounted the details of the production for her. And when she asked what more he had done, he said, without stating why, his rate of production had slowed considerably, but he had been preparing to work with Gottlieb on their largest picture yet.

Will you tell me about it?

Better, said Bloom, I will show you. Tomorrow.

The following day, Isabella insisted she had improved enough to walk the trail to Mount Terminus’s peak. She was growing restless and needed a change of scene. Meralda packed a picnic for them, and together Bloom and Isabella walked arm in arm as they made a geriatric ascent to the top of the mountain. Once there, Bloom pointed out the aqueduct carrying water to the basin and told her of the thousands of men and the incalculable amount of material it took to build it. He recalled for her the image of the dam filling the canyon pass and the holocaust of dust generated by the construction in the basin, and he described the nightmarish sunsets cast through its cumulous plumes. He spared her the dismay he felt over the loss of Mount Terminus’s former serenity. He left unspoken how disheartened he felt by the changes he saw every morning from the tower, the visions he had of walling himself in.

It was a day of gentle breezes, which brought with them the smell of baked earth and the strong scent of citrus and eucalyptus. When Bloom shut his eyes, he was reminded of his earliest days on Mount Terminus, when he was a child, when the mountain and its vistas were open and clear. On this day, the air was still and the chaparral silent enough they could hear the sounds of quail nervously warbling about unseen. And here they reclined and slept, and when she was awake and alert, Bloom read to Isabella Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog, and when they finished this melancholy seaside tale, they watched for some time a condor ride the thermal currents around and about the ranches of the valley.

When they had tired of the sun, Bloom walked Isabella down the trail and then they continued ambling farther down to the plateau.

I have a small surprise for you.

Bloom had earlier tied a long sash of black velvet around his waist, which he now removed, and with Isabella’s permission, he covered her eyes. He held her shoulder with one hand and folded his other hand over the curve of her hip. He guided her into the warehouse, where, once inside, he walked her up the stairs, sat her in a chair under a skylight, and told her to be still. When he had climbed to the part of the set he had finished only some weeks before her return, he instructed her to remove the blindfold, and when she did, she found herself looking into a vanity mirror, from where she could see in the mirror’s reflection the image of Aphrodite.

Where are you?

Observing you from beyond.

Bloom, who was looking down on her from behind the peepholes of the goddess’s eyes, stood up on a scaffold to reveal himself.

I had a tub carried into the villa’s gallery some months ago, thinking I’d be able to more easily reflect on Miranda isolated in that room, but I couldn’t bring myself to remove Mother’s paintings. So I reconstructed her room here.

For what purpose?

It’s their story I’m going to make into my next picture.

In the mirror’s reflection Bloom could see the smallest of smiles take shape. He once again crouched down and looked at Isabella through the pinholes of Aphrodite’s eyes, and from here he recalled how carefree and easy she had once been, and he knew from this vantage point, he was no longer looking at the same woman with whom he’d fallen in love. And while continuing to hide behind the façade, he was moved by a feeling of urgency he knew he would soon be incapable of containing. He understood that whatever ordeal Isabella had been through had been infinitely worse than his, but his experience had in its own way devastated him. And so, speaking from behind the goddess of love’s mask, he apologized to Isabella.

I’m sorry, he said. I’m so sorry …

What for?

I can’t continue on this way. I can’t pretend any longer.

Isabella fixed her eyes on his, and said, My dear, sweet Joseph.

I need to know. I need to understand.

*   *   *

Instead of accompanying him to the gardens that night after dinner, Isabella led Joseph to the parlor, where she had set up the projector and the screen and arranged on a table a stack of film canisters. With her hand on top of the pile, she said, I’ve been here. What you need to know, you’ll find inside these. What you will see, I have lived. And then she left Bloom to watch movies he would learn later that evening she had filmed. They were movies of the dead. The dead and the walking dead, the lamed and dismembered, the infected, the fevered, the deranged, the destroyed. For hours, Bloom sat in the dark, listening to the interminable clicks of his father’s drive and loop, experiencing with open eyes one repulsive vision after the next. He watched reel after reel of healthy young men cut down by machine gun volleys, witnessed them mined and thrown into the air in pieces. He saw, through the eye of Isabella’s lens, men vaporized by mortar and cannon rounds. Men disappearing into gaseous clouds from which they never emerged. He saw the half-faced, the crushed-faced, the gutted, the pulverized, men burned beyond recognition; the noseless, the eyeless, the jawless, the impaled, men with freshly bloodied stumps; the decomposed, the decomposing, the trench-footed, dead men hung over barbed wire, their sinew, their bowels eaten by rats, maggots bred within their open cavities eaten by ravens. He saw ravens shot down from the skies to be eaten by starving men. Most dreadful of all, Isabella had captured with her camera moments of death, bodies shuddering in death rattles, bodies exhaling their final breaths, the widening of eyes, the fixed glare of the newly dead, the cessation of the excruciating, the unbearable, the unjust, the inconceivable, horrific pain of men.

When Bloom had watched each reel to its completion, he searched the villa for Isabella and found her lying still on the chaise in his mother’s gallery. The night was half gone, but she was awake, listlessly staring up at one of his mother’s many paintings. He lay down next to her and took her in his arms and held her. And soon she began to talk. She explained to him that while crossing the North Atlantic, Dr. Straight suffered a heart attack. The grief, she said, I thought it had passed. I thought he was prepared to travel. When they reached Paris, the doctor had recovered to some degree but was too weak to continue on. Isabella hospitalized him for several weeks and then took him to a rented room. He willed his home and all his possessions to her. He encouraged her to return to Mount Terminus to be with Bloom. He regretted having taken her along to experience this. A few nights later, he had a stroke and died. In his last conscious moments, he saw in a mirror a reflection of his wife. I’ll only be a moment, Julia, he said at the end, and then he was gone. Isabella sent his body to be cremated, so she might easily carry it with her when she returned. She intended to inter his ashes beside his wife’s, but they would be lost in the chaos that followed. For a time, she said, she sat still and read. In the flat was a French translation of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. She drew strength from Bazarov’s cold nihilism, from his calculated, unfeeling sensibility. For a time, she became numb. Until she wasn’t. She packed her things, took along her camera and film, the invertiscope, and volunteered for the ambulance corps in time for the Battle of the Somme. She carried away men from the trenches and drove them to the field hospitals. One afternoon, when she was en route to the aid station, she crashed her ambulance, and she, herself, became a war casualty. She suffered a concussion and broke a bone in her leg and one in her arm, and in the aftermath of the accident she experienced what they said was a nervous state of exhaustion. Her entire body, as if a switch had been shut off inside it, ceased to function. She convalesced at a quiet sanitarium in the South by the sea, where, fate would have it, she was put in the care of Pierre Janet, the expert on brainwave entrainment who had invited Dr. Straight to join him on the battlefield. Dr. Janet helped Isabella recover to the degree he could help anyone recover from the horrors they had seen, and she, in turn, detailed for the doctor how to administer Dr. Straight’s invertiscope experiment. One day, not long after the armistice had been declared, she left her invention in Janet’s care, packed up the film she had shot, boarded a ship, and, not knowing where else to go, she returned to Bloom.

Bloom expected Isabella to expel the horror of this nightmare with tears after she had recounted her story, but instead she reported these details as if they were part of someone else’s narrative. Perhaps this was necessary, Bloom thought. If she felt it right away, all at once, the burden of it might destroy her. Perhaps it was healthier, he thought, that she saw these experiences from a distant remove, as she would have had she been wearing the invertiscope.

*   *   *

That night they remained in the gallery and Bloom held her close to him until he was certain she had fallen asleep. He drew the heavy curtains to darken the brightening room and went out into the morning light to the rose garden with a pair of pruning shears. He clipped red roses whose heads had opened recently enough their petals were still intact, yet opened long enough to the elements that they could easily be shaken free. He filled a bucket of these overripe roses and returned to the house, where he requested from Meralda a few items from her toilette, some perfume and bath oils, some powder, shampoo, a scrub brush, and he took all these things to the gallery and set them about the tub. When he returned to Isabella, he found her asleep with her body curled tightly around a pillow, her fingers clenched in fists as if she were shielding her face, and there was a noise, a loud and disturbing sound of pebbles rubbing against one another, grinding and churning, in a tedious and persistent rhythm. Bloom momentarily wondered what Isabella was squeezing in her fists, but it wasn’t until the grinding ceased and was followed by an incomprehensible mumbling, and then a restrained whimper like that of a dog who’d been shamed by its master, that he realized the noise was emanating from Isabella’s mouth. It was only when he eased her fists away from her face, he saw—as the grinding recommenced—that the horrible noise was being made by her teeth. Her jaw was clenching and pressing, gnashing in communion with an invisible force inside her. To help her release whatever it was she was reliving in her dreams, Bloom took hold of her face and whispered her name. Isabella, he said, Isabella. Isabella, he repeated, sounding the word out in his mouth, accentuating each syllable, speaking it as he had so many times when summoning her memory on his visits to Santa Ynez. He now reached out to touch her, to smooth over her hair, and just as the tip of his finger brushed her brow, she turned to him violently, thrashing her arms about. She grabbed hold of Bloom’s chest and pressed herself into him. Only then did she briefly awaken, enough to recognize it was him beside her. Oh, Joseph, she said wearily. I’m so sorry. And when her jaw relaxed and she grew calm, Bloom said, There, there. There, there. It’s all right. With Bloom holding her, the rest of her body, the muscles in her face, her arms and hands and legs, relaxed and stretched, and the lines of her body straightened into the self-possessed woman he once knew. In this peaceful state, he could see the Isabella he saw so clearly in his dreams on those nights he spent with La Reina del Fuego, when he dreamed of the Isabella he had held in his arms in this very room, and he knew in this instant the love and affection he once felt for her still lived inside him.

Isabella slept for many hours. She slept through the entire day, and as if this were the first real sleep she had had since she left Bloom, she slept into the early evening. When she awoke, Meralda brought her some chicken broth and bread, and when Isabella had eaten all of this, she asked for some more, and Meralda brought up a little while later a thick steak and potatoes and a jug of red wine. For dessert she dug heartily into a large block of cheese, then ate small pastries and cookies and a custard. Although he hadn’t slept in more than a day, Bloom’s attention was acute; this sight of Isabella returning to good health filled him with joy. When she asked him to read to her something frivolous and fun, he picked from a library shelf Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and after a while, he handed her the book to read on her own, and he went to the cellar to retrieve two buckets, both of which he filled with hot water. He carried these buckets into the gallery and emptied them into the tub, then, as Miranda’s servants had done for her, he repeated this task over and again until the tub was full. Each time he crossed the room, Isabella poked her eyes up over the top of the book, but Bloom chose to ignore her. He added to the water Meralda’s oils and a few drops of perfume, and when the room had filled with a soothing aroma, Bloom shook out the roses he had picked from the garden. All of them he shook out until the water’s surface was thoroughly disguised.

Isabella now ignored Bloom as he had ignored her. When the bath was prepared, she continued to read until the very moment Bloom snatched the book from her hands and cast it aside. It was only when Bloom felt himself grow serious, when he felt the urge to explain what it was he was going to do, the Isabella of the past, the strong and curious, the impetuous Isabella, who played at seduction with quiet misdirection, returned, and said, No, let’s not speak of it. Let’s never speak of it.

Yes, said Bloom, let’s not. Bloom helped her up, carried her across the room, and set her down to stand before the full-length mirror, where Bloom—with shaking hands—unzipped the back of her dress. He reached to the cuffs of its sleeves and eased them down until the neck folded over her small breasts; and down farther he pulled until she was able to step out of it. She raised her arms as Bloom set the dress aside and when he returned to his place behind her, he lifted her slip, turning it inside out over her head.

Isabella now stood before him with her chest bare and her bloomers hugging her waist and covering her midriff. As eager as he was to tear them away, Bloom, with great care, set her slip on top of her dress, and this time when he returned to stand behind her, he discovered Isabella stroking her arms as Manuel described Miranda—up and down, caressing one, then the other, her head lolling back with pleasure; and as she continued to do this, he slipped his fingers inside the waistband of her bloomers, feeling with their tips the smoothness of her flesh, and from behind, he pushed down, ran his knuckles over the generous curve of her ass, down the backs of her thighs and calves, until he had pulled them to the floor. She stepped out, and as he had done with her other items of clothing, he set her bloomers aside.

Bloom wanted nothing more than to lay his hands on her hips and feel the weight of her body against his, to kneel before her, as if in prayer, and press his nose into places it didn’t belong, but he had cast himself in the role of her servant, and was determined to attend to her, to abide by her desires, and heal her. He stood on the threshold and watched as indifferently as he knew how. He watched her step through the rose petals, watched her ease her body into the water, at which point she shut her eyes and disappeared under cover of bloodred petals.

*   *   *

For a week, Bloom waited. For a month, he waited. For two and then three and then four months, he waited. He waited for Isabella to recover. He moved her belongings from the cottage into the gallery, and for four months she didn’t leave this room. For four months, she ate, and read, and slept. For four months, Isabella became Bloom’s sole occupation. For four months, there existed nothing else but her. Every morning and every night, he clipped roses from the garden and drew Isabella her baths and undressed her and attended to her. In small increments of time, he could see changes take place in her spirit and body. In his company she grew more round in her belly and her breasts; her arms thickened and her cheeks grew more full, and soon enough, the fog that had settled into her eyes began to clear and her countenance was reconstituted into the mysterious and arresting object onto which Bloom could once again project his wonder. No longer the deeply wounded creature that had returned to him, she stopped asking for books written for children, but rather requested from the library lengthy tomes by Henry James and George Eliot, Trollope and Thackeray, books full of serious contemplation and social intrigues. And she grew fascinated with Jacob Rosenbloom’s back issues of Modern Astronomer, in which she followed the Great Debate between Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis on the subject of island universes. When she saw the first photographs of spiral clusters taken at the Solar Observatory, and saw the magnificence of the billions of stars magnified by the telescope’s hundred-inch mirror, she speculated along with Shapley and Curtis whether the spirals were gaseous nebulae or distant galaxies or universes separate from our own. Her newfound strength grew from the attention Bloom lavished upon her. And, no doubt, it grew, as well, because—like Miranda with regard to her most caring servant—she granted Bloom more and more liberty to attend to the pleasures of her body. Sometime into her second month of convalescence, after having soaked herself long enough in the oils and tonics and perfume of her bath to spiral the flesh on the tips of her toes, she one day lifted a leg onto the lip of the tub and asked Bloom to soap and massage her feet. For several weeks this became their customary morning. She would bathe, and Bloom would attend to her wrinkled feet. First to the heel, then to the curve of her arch, and then—as if each was its own separate appendage—to her toes. When this therapy alone no longer satisfied her, she asked him to shampoo her hair. And so, every morning thereafter, Bloom washed and massaged her feet and caressingly dug his soapy fingers into her hair, and when he rinsed it clean, he slicked back behind her ears her dark mane to reveal the fullness of her face. As his father had once attended to the leafy statuaries of his mother in his gardens—with such meticulous and calculated care—Bloom attended to Isabella. To her every whim. And soon during her bathing ritual—sometime at the start of her fourth month in the gallery—Isabella began to resemble more and more Manuel’s depiction of Miranda at her most indulgent and vital. One morning after he had shampooed her hair, she rose up from the bath with rose petals clinging to her skin and stood before him with her thickening figure, and asked that he now soap her shoulders and arms and hands. He dutifully stood before her and soaped her shoulders and arms and hands and each of her fingers as he had so attentively cared for each of her toes. When he had finished, and Isabella didn’t return to the water, he asked if she desired anything else. My neck, she said as she lifted her chin. And so Bloom moved inward along the line of her collarbone, pressing with his thumbs and forefingers, until his hands met at the base of her throat. He then pushed upward over the ridges of her airway to the bottom of her chin, and traced the line of her jaw. And while his hands gripped the circumference of her throat and neck, and as his eyes focused downward onto the water dripping off her pubis, she said to him very mildly, And the rest, please, Joseph. Bloom now worked his hands down the middle of her wet chest, and with one hand followed by the other he passed through the rise of her breasts, around which he playfully circled suds with his fingers until their tips swelled and hardened. Her breathing, he noticed, began to brush the bubbles across the backs of his hands. All of the rest, she now said. He lathered down to her midriff and spread his hands and fingers over her hips and washed upward to the narrow folds under her arms, and then down again to converge on her pubic bone, which she reflexively pressed against the pressure of his palms. All of me, she repeated. But Bloom didn’t allow his hands to descend beyond this point, but rather he fanned his fingers out to the tops of her thighs. He knelt before her to lather first the left leg and then the right, which was when Isabella said to him, You’re being cruel now. And without warning, she turned and bent forward and unfairly presented to Bloom her ass. Touch me there, she said. When Bloom hesitated, she now ordered in a commanding voice, Touch me there. So Bloom touched her there. His throat swelled as he touched her there, as he slipped his finger through the line of her ass and ran it along the rim of her anus. Again, she said. But Bloom moved on to soap her inner legs and dimple the springy flesh of her rump. Again, she said, more insistently this time. Bloom slowly dipped his finger into the soapy starburst, as she—with one hand against the lip of the tub and with the other hand between her legs—began to touch herself. Blow on me there, she said. And so holding her open, Bloom blew on her there. Bite me there, she said. When Bloom hesitated, she said it again, Bite me there. Pushing her open wider now, he pressed his face into her and nibbled on her there. He could feel the rhythmic motion of her touch on his lips, and excited by this, he now had no control over his desire. He dug his tongue in there. Forced his nose in there. Nuzzled his chin there. He nibbled and pressed and tickled there with his teeth and his tongue, until he felt her quiver in his mouth, the innermost part of her body convulse and clench and release. And as the convulsions eased, he lifted himself up and cleansed her heaving back. Very gently, he rubbed in synchronicity with her breath, and he waited for her to slip down the wall of the tub and wither into the pool of petals. When she did this, Bloom returned to the threshold, and fully alert, smelling and tasting the perfume and oils on and in his mouth, he kept a watchful eye on Isabella as she briefly nodded off in the warm fragrant water.

*   *   *

The day Bloom walked Isabella out of the gallery for the first time in four months, the first thing she noticed on their stroll around the grounds was the state of the rose garden: all of their bushes had been denuded. She insisted Bloom take her for a closer look, and there she found among all the cross-hatched branches the one remaining rose he had intentionally left untouched to remind her that the concentric rings of the garden would once again brim with color. But seeing the dreary circle of land with all its lattices filled with skeletal remains, seeing what result her pain had wreaked on such a thing of beauty, she looked at the one remaining bloom with some distress, and with fatalistic dread in her voice said, If I ever ravaged you as I’ve ravaged this garden, Joseph …

Bloom’s response to these words came readily and sincerely: You can pull up every inch of my roots. It will change nothing.

But, Joseph, she said, pausing to extend her arms to the naked branches all around them, look at what I’ve done.

Bloom reminded her that it was he who did it.

That, she said, disturbs me most of all. Isabella’s eyes began to mist over. She walked away from Bloom now, out of the garden toward the grove.

You’re overcome, said Bloom as he trailed after her. Let’s walk. Let’s take a long walk.

You don’t understand, she said. She turned around and, with her fists clenched, started bridging the short distance between them. Something’s happened to me! Her voice was angry. She drew her nose to his, and said, I feel! I feel, I need, I deeply need … Her eyes picked up the vast blue of the sky as she searched for the right words. I’ve become insatiable. Ravenous. Like a swarm of locusts.

You’re alive, Bloom said gently. He reached out to her and ran a finger under her nostrils where a tear dangled on her nose’s bulb. And you’re healthy. He touched the back of her neck and then took hold of her under her arms. And you’re here, with me, and there’s nothing you can do to me to make me feel any worse than I felt when I thought I’d lost you … Blind me. Maim me. Kill me, if that’s what you want. I don’t care.

Oh, Joseph, she laughed softly through her crying, don’t say such things.

Honestly, said Bloom. I’m your servant. I’m your slave.

She took hold of his face and held his head steady, and looking into him with a strength and resolve he recognized as the fortified young woman he once knew, she said, Ask me to marry you. Ask me to sit still with you on this mountain to make a quiet and easy life.

The idea of this both confused and delighted Bloom in equal measure.

I’m ready to be at peace, she said. I’m ready to feel at home. All you need is ask.

Even though Bloom could clearly see in the pressed shape of Isabella’s mouth that she didn’t believe a word of what she was saying, and that her desire to be caged by the limits of such a covenant ran contrary to the words she had spoken not more than a few seconds earlier, Bloom asked Isabella if she would be his wife. And she said, Yes.

*   *   *

They married some months later at the foot of the reflecting pool. A justice of the peace wearing a dusty suit and smelling of tequila officiated, and Gottlieb, Meralda, Gus, and Simon bore witness. They sat in the courtyard afterward and were served by Meralda. Once drunk, Gottlieb toasted Bloom’s father—Wherever he may be!—and the memory of Dr. Straight—Who I had not nearly enough time to know!—and the newlyweds—May you reflect in each other all the beauty there is to discover in this world! And after they had filled themselves with food and wine, the wedding party walked Joseph and Isabella to the master bedroom, and wished them happiness and a fruitful sleep.

For several months, Bloom and Isabella continued to live with the same intensity of spirit they enjoyed during Isabella’s convalescence, but in the months after these, when the rose garden had replenished itself with blooms, Bloom began to recognize a Manichaean disquiet in Isabella’s presence and he could see quite clearly how the sizable plot of land on which they lived and the union in which they were bound had in her mind become the fortress Bloom feared it might become. Something had awakened in Isabella in the brief time they had been married; some force of will deep within her, the same force that sometimes at night still caused her to gnash her teeth, had emerged into daylight, and although Bloom didn’t think she was aware of what was taking hold of her, he knew. He knew it to be the same animalistic force he felt inside her when they made love, the same insatiable hunger she attempted to describe to him on the day they were engaged, and Bloom knew he alone was incapable of putting this force to rest. He knew of nothing he could do to make her feel content within the microcosm he had fashioned for himself since the time he was a child. There wasn’t enough sex and kindness and love to snuff it out. He could, therefore, only watch this creeping vine work its way into her, into them, with the frosty indifference with which one greets an unwelcome guest into his home.

Bloom encouraged her to search out a man named George Ritchie, an optician who had designed the enormous parabolic mirror at the Solar Observatory. He lived only a few hours away by car. She drove off one afternoon to meet with Dr. Ritchie, and when she returned, she reported to Bloom what she had found when she arrived, an aged and pathetic creature who complained of headaches and insomnia, of maelstroms in his head that plagued him so often he had named them. Whirligus, he called them. As fascinating as Isabella found the observatory and his diverse collection of mirrors and the designs he had made for an even larger telescope that had the potential to unveil that much more of the sun’s surface and the unseen sky, she couldn’t bear the disappointment she felt for the man himself, and after only a few visits she decided her fascination for the man’s work wasn’t great enough to tolerate his company. She soon searched out others whose discipline was closer to the work done by Dr. Straight, but in each instance reported a similar story to the one Bloom had heard when she returned from visiting Dr. Ritchie. Not one of the men whose work she admired, and would have enjoyed furthering, lived up to her expectations, not one equaled her memory of Dr. Straight, and finding all lacking in one way or another, after these few brief meetings, too disillusioned to search anymore, she no longer pursued what had until then been integral to her life.

Perhaps Bloom shouldn’t have been surprised to see Isabella appear relieved to be free of the past, free from the tether of memory attaching her to Dr. Straight, from the diligence and discipline she had practiced throughout her youth. Perhaps he should have more readily understood when one afternoon she packed away the part of his father’s collection yet to be recorded, and placed it back on the shelf to which it belonged. No more, she said to Bloom, I am done. And as soon as she had put away the elder Rosenbloom’s artifacts, she said to Bloom, I want to become part of the world. I’m tired of being separate from it, observing it as if I were somehow less animal than the rest. And with this simple declaration, Isabella was Dr. Straight’s protégée no more. Nor, it seems, was she content any longer with their quiet life on the top of Mount Terminus.

She had come to understand what Bloom already knew on that day he asked her to marry him. That the union of their commonality, their shared curiosities, had been undermined by all the bodily humors she had witnessed expelled from men, the horrors she had smelled and wretched on. He could hold her. He could ease her suffering. He could provide her pleasure and escape. Invite her into the world of his imagination. But Bloom didn’t have it in him to thrill her, to provoke her, to charge her with the sort of electrical current she required to feel fully alive. When Bloom implied such things in the quiet of Mount Terminus’s solitude, Isabella claimed this wasn’t the case. Not at all. She had, by now, become better acquainted with Gottlieb and Simon; she had grown accustomed to their company, and they to hers, enough so Bloom’s collaborator and his brother began to speak freely in front of her about her husband, about how it had been far too long for Bloom to have let his gifts lie fallow. And Isabella agreed.

So she would not be a hindrance, she began to take short excursions into town in Bloom’s car, where, one afternoon while eating lunch at the Pico House Hotel, she recognized at the table beside hers, Nora Duncan, the actress who played the fountain nymph in Mephisto’s Affinity. The two women had a pleasant chat, Isabella told Bloom in the parlor that same evening, and she made plans to meet with her at the theater the following night. The two regularly met thereafter for lunch, and, in small gradations Bloom hardly noticed at first, Isabella started to transform into a woman he hardly recognized. She opened accounts at the fashion houses downtown and spent a great deal of time shopping with Nora. She took up smoking and afternoon cocktails, and—Bloom would learn only after the fact—found a more than willing companion in her new brother-in-law, whom she would come to see much more frequently than Bloom did. Bloom probably shouldn’t have encouraged it, but when he learned she and Simon were now circulating at the same dinner parties and nightclubs, Bloom insisted his brother do what he could to keep her entertained, to escort her to his premieres, to introduce her to his wide circle of friends and associates, to help her mingle with the new crop of motion picture colonists migrating here by the day. Simon didn’t think it the best idea. He encouraged Bloom to join them. He would arrange for his tailor to visit the estate, to measure Bloom for a suit. He would send Murray Abrams to the estate to civilize Bloom in the ways of society, to practice him in the art of meaningless conversation. They could attend a few parties together, Simon suggested, and after an outing or two, who knew, perhaps Bloom would come to welcome the occasional night out on the town; perhaps he would even take a liking to someone outside his immediate circle. You should make the effort, said Simon. For her, you should make every effort. You do know, don’t you, that she’s not a woman you can take for granted?

I would only spoil her fun, said Bloom.

Joseph, she needs looking after.

Won’t you look after her for me?

My dear brother, how it is you’re able to depict the complicated motives of men in your art without truly understanding them will forever remain a mystery to me.

*   *   *

Several times a week, Isabella dressed in gowns that displayed the full extent of her beauty and developing tastes, and she and Simon would drive down Mount Terminus into the basin, where the extension of the city had become complete. Out they drove onto the grid filled with more and more elaborate homes, with green lawns and colorful gardens kept alive by aqueduct water flowing ceaselessly from the northeast. Soon enough, Isabella hired a driver and began accepting invitations on her own. Several evenings a week, she left for these parties unaccompanied to homes and hotel suites, beach cottages and ballrooms, and often didn’t return to Mount Terminus until early the next morning, when, so as not to wake Bloom, she would sleep in the gallery with the door locked, and wouldn’t emerge until late the following afternoon. Bloom would know where she had been only from the invitations that arrived addressed to them both. Otherwise, they never spoke of the parties or the people she’d met or what exciting distractions and entertainments existed in the widening city below. Rather, when she chose to give Bloom her full attention, she was some paler version of his Isabella, the Isabella who, for the time being, tolerated her reclusive husband, whose lifestyle he stubbornly clung to out of habit and fear of a world he couldn’t imagine himself being part of. As he never questioned her or complained, she, for now, didn’t question or complain to him. Instead, for the time being, when they were together, they talked of the subtle changes in the weather and the night sky, what news she had heard from Simon about his most recent conquests—his most recent acquisitions, the newest actors, actresses, directors under contract, how Bloom’s preproduction of The Death of Paradise was coming along. And not frequently, but often enough that he didn’t feel entirely deprived, they acted out—with more comfort and familiarity than excitement—the passion they once enjoyed together in the gallery.

*   *   *

The more estranged from Isabella he grew, the clearer Bloom’s focus became in the studio. For years now he had been dreaming of The Death of Paradise, seeing it piecemeal, in fragments, but he had now begun to see it all at once, and knew if he shut himself away for a period of time, if he allowed the story to fully consume him, he would be able to bind all the disparate parts together once and for all, and finally be done with it. He thought perhaps once he was through, once he had put this final picture behind him, he could become more the man Isabella needed him to be. If she saw to what lengths he had gone in making this picture, he believed, she would appreciate the way her absence had affected him. She might see in the complexity of this work he planned on dedicating to Isabella, the complexity and the depth of the love he felt for her. Except to travel down to the new Mount Terminus Studios lot to oversee the construction of the larger sets—those on which the Spanish locales would be shot, the ship on which the Estrellas and their cohort would make their journey, the Mission Santa Theresa de Avila in which the priests would reside—Bloom remained behind the closed doors of his studio, drawing and thinking through the smallest of details, the lighting, the camera movements and perspectives, the blocking, the narrative and text for the intertitles. He wrote many pages of notes on the way he wanted the actors to perform, notes he would deliver to Gottlieb some weeks before they went into production. He feared that the picture, if not treated with the most subtle movements and gestures, could easily be reduced to overwrought melodrama. As was always the case when Bloom immersed himself in this part of his process, he rarely slept, paced a great deal, held elaborate conversations with himself about the elaborate scope of this picture. Its epic length he found stifling—the walls of his studio could hardly contain the many hundreds of panels he had drawn, and although Bloom had the ability to see and feel everything all at once, the energy it required to maintain this vision depleted him. He had grown so lost to his pursuit, Isabella had begun to notice the toll it had been taking on his health and appearance, and she felt it necessary one night to visit Bloom in his studio to express her concern. Bloom hadn’t been aware of it, but Isabella had from time to time been observing him work from outside the studio window. What she had seen, she told Bloom, she found disconcerting. She was particularly upset by the sight of him talking with himself, speaking at times as if there were someone there beside him. She found herself haunted by the images of him listening and responding to that invisible someone. When she saw him like this, she told him, she felt something break inside her. She felt overtaken by feelings of shame, and she wondered if her neglect had contributed to Bloom’s state of mind. If I’m hurting you by not being here, she said, I beg you to say so. Bloom rejected this idea. As long as she was content with the life she was leading, he refused to stand in her way. Although he most certainly missed her, and wished she would spend more time in his company, he wouldn’t keep her from whatever life she wished to lead, no matter how unrecognizable she became to him. Given what he knew of her, knowing so intimately the insatiable hunger inside her, he wouldn’t be the one to restrain her. He wouldn’t risk being perceived as a barrier to her happiness. He wouldn’t allow her to despise him for keeping her from doing whatever it was she needed to do for herself. To preserve and protect their love was his only purpose, and so he said, as a way to placate her, I promise you, you’re mistaking my obsession for distress.

To this she said, I’m afraid for you.

I’m hardly in mortal danger.

Nevertheless, said Isabella.

It’s true, I do lose myself to my work, but I’m not in any peril.

Isabella eased her head onto Bloom’s chest and again said, Nevertheless.

I’m touched by your concern, but, really, truly, you needn’t worry.

She then held Bloom for a while, and he could feel from the tightness with which she held on to him there was something more she wanted to say. I know how it goes against your nature …

What?

What would you think if we were to host a party here when you’ve completed your preparations? What would you think if we were to fill the gardens and the courtyard with music? I want us to dance together. I want to see you mindless and frivolous, if only for one night.

Bloom said, I’ll dance you through the gardens right now if you like.

Please, Joseph. I’m being serious.

Bloom was reminded of Mephisto’s Affinity, of Mrs. Mephisto ordering her husband to the surface for a well-deserved Sabbath.

Really, Joseph. It’s a wonderful feeling to dance to music and feel yourself moving about with others moving beside you. Try to imagine it. Try to imagine the fascination you might feel for the strangers surrounding you.

You know I’m not inclined that way.

I know, but I want you to experience it for yourself—they’re only people, not unlike you or I.

Bloom tried to imagine it, but he couldn’t move in his mind beyond the images of faceless shadows pressing against them in the dark. But when Isabella then said, so disconsolately, I’ve missed you, Joseph, more than you could possibly know, Bloom was unable to say no to her.

Yes, he said, why not?… I’ll rise to the occasion.

Do you mean it? Do you really mean it?

I’m a grown man, Bloom reasoned on her behalf. If I’m to be your husband, if I’m to be with you in every way, I can’t remain apart from the world forever, now can I?

Isabella stopped clutching his ribs and pulled her face from his chest. I know you don’t really mean it, but I do want you to try. I really do want you to give it a try.

Then I’ll try. For you, I will try. He stood up and walked Isabella outside and down into the courtyard. They wandered together about the trunks of the grove and Isabella asked, You do still love me, Joseph, don’t you?

Of course, I do, said Bloom. I’ll always love you. Bloom turned to Isabella and searched the darkness for the contours of her face, but found his eyes unable to make out its lines. In that instant, Isabella had disappeared right before him.

*   *   *

In a month’s time, Bloom completed his preliminary work on The Death of Paradise. Every image of the story had been imagined, every transition, every line of dialogue. He had sketched every costume he wished sewn, every prop he wished to have manufactured or found, wrote directions for how every set was to be dressed. He had mapped every movement to be made by his cameramen and his actors, every lighting configuration, for every track to be laid. He scheduled the dates they would appear on what stage, the order in which every scene would be shot. There were five volumes in all, all of which he neatly lined up on his drafting table and presented to Gottlieb, who, upon seeing to what lengths Bloom had gone, nearly wept with joy. I have produced in you, Gottlieb said with his usual hyperbolic flourish, a burning bush! What lives inside of you, Rosenbloom, is a mystery for the ages! And on this day, Bloom departed his studio with no plans of returning to it anytime soon. He bathed for a considerable number of hours. Afterward, Meralda shaved him and cut his hair, trimmed his nails. He dressed himself in a suit and a pair of shined shoes. And he went to Isabella and told her his news. And Isabella was pleased.

*   *   *

The gardeners arrived shortly after daybreak. They set about grooming the grounds under Gus’s purview as they had done for some years now. Not long after they appeared and began meandering through the labyrinths to clip away the overgrowth of the hedgerows, the kitchen staff and wait staff Isabella had hired to assist Meralda arrived, and soon they began unloading from trucks enough crates of food and wine, ice and spirits, to fortify the entire city. They unloaded dozens of tables and chairs, sets of crystal and silver, bales of linen. From Mount Terminus Productions arrived the makings for a stage and a dance floor, and they brought along as well many bundles of kerosene torches, some of which went to the courtyard and the grove, but most of which were immediately untied by the gardeners, who then spiked them into the ground one by one along the urn-shaped figure formed by the convergence of the gardens; and down the edges of the straight drive they continued hammering on to the front gate. When the last of the trucks had delivered their freight, and the rhythmic pounding of the stage construction had ceased, several of the men from the wait staff, along with the gardeners, took to raking the gravel before the house’s entry, down to the street, where, when they had finished smoothing over the tire tracks and had landscaped the white stones into a uniform surface, they swung the wrought-iron gates closed and opened the pedestrian entry beside it. The front grounds emptied now, and Bloom, who had been watching at various times of the day the comings and goings from his tower’s pavilion, waited in anticipation for the encroaching city he had witnessed grow up before his eyes to make its entry into his home.

Knowing he would understand the nature of this question without lengthy explanation, Bloom asked Gottlieb when his small, bearded friend climbed up to greet him, Why, Gottlieb, must I see shadows where there are none?

Gottlieb rested his elbows on the pavilion’s ledge and placed his fingers in his beard. Simply put. You are blessed. Touched by God. And those touched by God are always a little mad. You, Rosenbloom, are quite normal in that respect.

I am normal in my madness.

Yes, said Gottlieb. You are.

They all seemed to arrive at once, shortly after the last streaks of twilight evaporated from the horizon. They parked their cars on the road, and as couples and small packs they walked as shadows into the orange glow of the torchlit drive. They strolled along the gardens’ borders, many pointing and commenting on the sizable grounds.

It’s time, Isabella said as she climbed into the pavilion with Bloom. She looked magnificent, and Bloom told her so. She was wearing a long dress made of crushed silk and around her neck a pearl choker. In her hand she carried a leather-bound tablet, which she handed to him.

What’s this?

A gift from me, said Gottlieb. To calm the nerves.

If you find yourself feeling uncomfortable, said Isabella, search out a seat somewhere and draw.

The more cruel you are to your guests, said Gottlieb, the more they’ll admire you.

You needn’t be cruel, said Isabella, kissing his cheek. They’ll admire you as you are. When you’re ready to come down, I’ll be waiting.

She’s nervous for you, said Gottlieb as Isabella descended the staircase.

As she should be. Bloom watched Isabella’s dress sweep the stairs as she made her exit, and then he and Gottlieb continued to watch them come. They came and they came, and soon enough Bloom could hear the orchestra strike up, and over the din of the instruments tuning he heard Simon’s voice cry up to him. Joseph!

Remember, said Gottlieb. You’re meant to be affable.

Bloom leaned over the rail and shrugged his shoulders at his brother.

Don’t come down, I’ll come up! Simon broke from his entourage and Bloom saw him move in the direction of the service entrance, and a few moments later he came charging up to greet them. He looked out onto the sparkle of lights scattered across the basin, and said, It’s been some time since I was last up here. I forgot how far and wide you can see from your perch.

You’re always welcome to share it with me.

I was told in advance that if I saw you up here when I arrived, I was to escort you down and keep an eye on you. But before I drag you down there, I was hoping you and I could talk for a minute. Simon turned to Gottlieb.

You needn’t say it, said the little man. I know you well enough.

I was thinking, said Simon when Gottlieb had left them. I was hoping you’d consider something …

What’s that?

A suggestion.

With regard to what?

Isabella.

What about her?

She’s lost, Joseph. She’s in need of a purpose.

I’ve tried. But this, said Bloom with a hand out toward the oncoming throng, is what she wants.

Which is why you must show her she’s greater than all this nonsense.

Isn’t this your sort of nonsense?

I didn’t say it wasn’t right for me. But I can tell you, it most certainly isn’t right for her. She is lost, said Simon. I can promise you that. And if she is lost, you are lost, and if you are lost, I …

What?

I have failed you. And myself.

How’s that?

I’ve invested a considerable amount of money into your latest effort and I have no intention of seeing the promise of the return dashed because you’re blind to the needs of the living.

Simon delivered this line as if it was intended to be funny, but Bloom couldn’t find the humor in it.

Just ask her to assist you on The Death of Paradise. She’s talked about nothing else since you locked yourself away.

Has she?

She’s enthralled with the story.

She and I, we discovered it together.

I know.

Before she left. Before she became …

My point exactly.

But she’s only expressed her concern about me. She’s said nothing to me one way or the other about the picture itself.

That’s because she hasn’t wanted to get in your way. She has it in her mind that you need to be left on your own to do whatever it is you do when you lose yourself to your work. Simon waved his arm around the aviary. She treats you as if you’re some fragile creature who must have his plumage fluffed just so, for fear of risking an Icarus-like plummet.

Bloom thought this over for a moment. Perhaps I do.

You and every other prima donna worth my trouble. But you’re missing my point. Your wife, the ever-so-lovely Mrs. Rosenbloom, has lost her way. And you, my oblivious brother, need to show her she has a place by your side.

But of course she does, said Bloom. She must know that.

I don’t think she does.

Here I was all this time thinking she needed the freedom to explore this other side of herself, and you’re telling me I’ve in actuality been neglecting her?

No, said Simon. Not at all. I’m simply saying you should invite her in to our little world of magic-making and let’s see what happens.

She won’t think I’m pressuring her to give up her new life? Her new friends?

I have a feeling, a very good feeling, she will be receptive.

Yes?

Yes! Even if she doesn’t say as much, she needs you to show her the way. She needs a nudge in the right direction.

What can I say?… I’ll nudge her.

Good.

And Simon?

Yes, Joseph?

Thank you.

Don’t thank me. Just come along, or I won’t hear the end of it.

*   *   *

A clamor of voices, a voracious sound Bloom had never before heard, filled the tower stairwell as they descended. He followed Simon to the bottom and entered the villa through the front entrance, where he found illuminated by bright incandescent light the hundreds of shadows he had watched walk the drive. They stood about in small groups throughout the entirety of the house. Never before—not even in all his years on the overcrowded lot—had Bloom seen so many people crushed into one place or felt the physical warmth or smelled the commingling of scents generated by bodies standing in such close proximity. The biting scents of perfumes and colognes, the briny wafts of damp body odor, the savory whiffs of cured meats and smoked fish, he took it in all at once as they brushed past people acting out private performances in the corridors. The scents and the cacophony of conversation, the monologues, the piano music from the parlor contaminated by the music from the courtyard, all went to Bloom’s head. He was relieved to hear one of the bartenders say, when Simon asked if he happened to know where she was, that he had just seen Isabella step outside. Why don’t you go ahead, said Simon. I’ll bring out the drinks. All Bloom could manage was a nod, and then he slipped away down the long corridor running to the courtyard doors. He made his way outside, where he discovered Isabella standing at the nearest corner of the reflecting pool surrounded by several young men and a young woman who was swinging the head of a dead fox. He knew it would be proper for him to join them and announce himself, but they all appeared so familiar with one another, he wasn’t certain how to interject himself without disturbing the festive mood. He instead headed for one of the café tables set around the edge of the dance floor, and there took a seat, and so not to make it appear as if he were in need of anyone’s attention, he opened the tablet Gottlieb had given Isabella to give to him, and he took Gottlieb’s suggestion: he started sketching, and as Gottlieb had predicted, the movement of his hands calmed him. Perhaps because of the power of suggestion, or because he had manifested in his mood the great discomfort he had felt throughout the day, he found himself making a grotesque mockery out of the woman swinging the dead animal. He extended her sharp nose into an oversized beak. Her slim figure, he made skeletal. He exaggerated the bones of her shoulders and chest, extended the length of her fingers, elongated her jaw, pointed her chin, hollowed her eyes, diminished her cheeks, yet he left unchanged the elegant gown she wore and posed her body with the same glamorous poise with which she carried herself, and he hung over the joint of her bony elbow the fox, to which he added an overly long tongue that lifelessly lolled from the corner of its dark lip. To the men, Bloom did the same as he did to the woman. He turned them into Punchinellos dressed for Saturnalia, well prepared to feast on Isabella, who he drew as full and round, with a softness. However, he couldn’t help but notice, as he fixed the lines forming her image on the page, how, as she talked with these creatures—who, with their enormous gestures, appeared to be acting for an invisible camera—Isabella appeared to be mirroring them, and comfortably so, as if for a long time now she had been studying how oversized and artificial emotion was expressed in the features of the face and the physicality of the body. At the sight of this, Bloom felt a queasiness grow inside him. Had he not been so compliant, he wondered, would she have turned to this? Or had he tried to cage her as Fernando caged Miranda, would she have turned into one of these creatures anyway? He began to see all around him grotesqueries from the hand of Hieronymus Bosch. Feral, thought Bloom, and predatory. Sharp in teeth and claw, in the darting movements of the eyes. He could see clearly for the first time since their day in the naked rose garden how Isabella’s hunger, her enormous appetite, had in this company manifested itself into a character with whom Bloom felt at odds. For this role, for these absurd people, she no longer pursued her scientific interests? For these mindless conformists, she was no longer satisfied with the quiet subtleties of Mount Terminus? For her place among these ridiculous men and women, she had abandoned him for Simon’s companionship?

From Bloom’s position in the courtyard, he saw Simon detained at the door by a small throng of mannequins. He parted their closed shoulders with a small movement of his chin and made his way outside. As Simon walked toward him, Bloom noticed Isabella’s confidante point the fox’s snout in his brother’s direction. She then said something that caused Isabella to lift her hand to her cheek. Her eyes now trailed Simon’s movement around the edge of the dance floor, and when they reached Bloom, she must have seen with what disappointment, with what revulsion, he had been watching her, because she removed the mask she had been wearing an instant earlier, or, perhaps, Bloom considered, she put one on for him. Some woman wearing a bird of paradise in her hair now touched Isabella’s shoulder, and there it was again, an arched brow, a smile wide and open enough for a snake to slither through, her face in its entirety a figure of cartoon surprise. Isabella soon excused herself from her company and walked over.

How long have you been sitting here? she asked Bloom as she greeted Simon with a brush of her cheek to his.

Just long enough, Bloom heard himself saying. He didn’t intend his words to sound accusatory, but they did, and he didn’t make an effort to correct his tone. When Isabella heard this, her eyes looked to the table on which sat Bloom’s open tablet, and seeing what image was there, she now knew better than to ask how he was getting along. She nodded her head in recognition of his mood, and then, after a brief pause, Simon, who had undoubtedly heard the intolerance in his brother’s voice, interrupted the awkwardness by saying to Bloom, I don’t think I ever told you, Joseph, there was a brief period of time when I was a student that I worked in a department store to make up for the poor wage Sam paid me in the theater. This store, they made the softest, most supple, most elegant gloves you have ever seen. Leather gloves worn by the most fashionable women. To secure my position, I visited Sam’s tailor and conned the poor man to put on Sam’s bill two of the tailor’s finest shirts and two of his finest suits made from the finest material he had available. I went on to Sam’s shoemaker and did the same. Once I was in costume, I took on the role of salesclerk, and the manager, seeing how well I had studied my part, put me on the floor. One of my responsibilities—the very reason I was keen to take the job—was to interview the young women who modeled our merchandise. We would advertise for women with delicate hands. Long fingers. Long and thin and elegant to observe in motion. And from this advertisement, in came dozens of beautiful girls, any one of which you’d think were worthy of the position. Simon, now addressing Isabella, said, But you’d be surprised what it takes to show a fine pair of gloves. It takes a very special pair of hands to make a woman of a certain position, a very elegant sort of woman, fall in love with her handwear. Here, he said, motioning to Isabella. She looked to Bloom, then politely offered Simon her arm, at which point Bloom’s brother ran a knuckle over the generous length of Isabella’s forefinger and up over the curve of her wrist. Here, you see? You see this uninterrupted line? This almost imperceptible line extending from the very tip of the finger to the height of the forearm? This perfect line, right here, on you, my dear, this incredibly rare line that exists only on the rarest of women, this is the continuous line I spent many weeks searching out on God knows how many women, and because of how rare it is, rarely, very rarely, would I ever find it. You wouldn’t think it, he said to Bloom, but a fine pair of hands, Joseph, a really fine pair, is as rare as the rarest of precious gems. Simon now paused and leaned his forehead toward Isabella. Had you walked onto my floor, on you, I could have shown our entire line. With you, I could have made a bundle. He now gave her hand a gentle pat, set it down at her side, and pulled himself away.

It was impossible to see in the dim light, but Bloom was certain from the smile on Isabella’s face, a smile he recognized from their postcoital entanglements, she was aglow, and seeing in her expression how taken she was with Simon, he could feel himself growing hot.

Simon now leaned over Bloom and shut his tablet. He slid his hand under Bloom’s chin and turned it to Isabella’s face. Be a gentleman and take your wife for a little twirl.

Bloom pulled his face away from Simon. No, he said. Maybe later.

Then, said Isabella, perhaps Simon will.

Yes, said Bloom, by all means, Simon.

Don’t you mind? said his brother.

No, said Bloom, waving them off.

Well, you should.

No. Go. Dance. Be merry.

With a stern look he had never before received from Isabella, she placed her hand in Simon’s, and together they walked onto the dance floor. Upon seeing them, the orchestra leader called up the horn section with his baton and waved the musicians into a lively rhythm. Hearing the music change pace, the men and women milling about inside the house started to pair off and make their way outdoors. The courtyard, Bloom could see, was soon going to fill, and at the sight of this onrush, his physical discomfort began to intensify. How, he thought, could he have handled himself more poorly? His chest tightened at the sight of Isabella’s breast brushing against Simon’s lapel. His heart began to beat in a flutter every time she turned up her nose and lifted her eyes to look at him. The mentholated air began to smell sweet and inadequate for breathing. A woman of ghostly pallor whose hair was coiled and encrusted with small jewels now sat down across from him and asked Bloom if he was all right.

Why do you ask?

You look faint, she said.

No, said Bloom, I’m fine.

I know faint, she said, and you look it. Weak in the eyes.

Bloom excused himself, and feeling a heaviness in his legs, he stood up. He managed a smile, and leaving his tablet behind, made his way through the crowd, exited the courtyard through the pergola, and moved on into the grove. When he reached the drive he walked between the hedgerows, passing as he went couples embracing in the shadows. He pressed on past these darkened figures to a turn that led to a dead end, and when he found it unoccupied, he blew out the flame of the nearest torch, and with a sweet waft of kerosene filling his nose, he lay down on a bench to look into a moonless sky. And here he shut his eyes and lay still. When his head had cleared, when he was once again able to hear his own thoughts, he felt a hand brush over his hair, and there he found when he opened his eyes Roya sitting beside him. She lifted his head and placed it in her lap, and there, in the dark corner, she continued to caress him, to pacify him. They sat this way for a long time, and when Roya stopped moving her fingers through his hair, she sat Bloom up and took his hand. Together they walked out of the garden and she led him to the cellar door. They descended into the vaults and went to the opening of the chamber, and there Roya sent Bloom up into the darkness, into the quiet of Manuel’s secret room.

*   *   *

There Bloom sat and stared at the projection table, on top of which he saw, after some time had passed, Isabella walk into the gallery and shut the door behind her. She lay down on the chaise, where she covered her face with her hands. A few moments later, in walked Simon, who, seeing her distraught, sat at her side.

They didn’t speak. They merely observed each other. And Bloom could see what was in Isabella’s mind.

Simon soon placed a hand on her cheek to wipe away a tear, and he let his palm rest there. Isabella didn’t push it away. Rather, she lifted her hand and placed it over his, and held it there. She now lifted her chin so Simon could better see her eyes, and as she turned her face to his, she smoothed over his knuckles with her fingers. She said something to him and he said something in return. Upon hearing whatever it was she said next, he bent down and kissed her forehead. For quite a while he kissed her there on her brow, then turned his cheek and affectionately pressed it to where his lips had been. Simon said something more to her, then removed himself and walked out of the room. Isabella now sat up, her face no longer forlorn, but repaired. She touched the corners of her eyes, righted her dress, then she, too, exited the room.

*   *   *

Bloom now sat and thought. Was this what Simon meant when he said Isabella was lost? Did he fail to mention that they were lost together?

For the remainder of the night, he considered what he had seen.

He had seen it, hadn’t he?

And if it was what he saw, what was he to do?

Was there, he wondered, anything he could do?

Should he react in the ways he knew men to react when betrayed by those they held dearest?

Or should he pretend not to have seen what he had seen? Perhaps he hadn’t seen it at all? Perhaps he could convince himself he had imagined it?

Should he not be able to pretend, however, what then?

His instinct was to forgive.

But when he thought of forgiveness, he wondered, How does one forgive such a thing? He began to live out in his mind a future in which he did forgive, and as he did so, it occurred to him what sacrifices this would entail. He thought: If this was true, as it certainly appeared to be from the expressions he observed on Isabella’s and Simon’s faces, would he have to watch for the indefinite future his wife look upon his brother in that way?

He allowed this to play out, and found this scenario unbearable.

And here in reaction to these unbearable thoughts arrived an anger he couldn’t suppress. Here arrived a primal rage that erupted in a primal roar. He lifted his head to the pitched roof and wailed.

Yet, he thought when he had finished howling into Manuel Salazar’s void, if he were to act on this primal scream, what good could come of it?

What would happen if he tried to impede them? If he shouted his protest. Disallowed them. Dictated to them. Condemned them. Punished them. Exercised his vengeance upon them.

And here his better nature reappeared.

This was his brother and his wife, for whom he would want, under any other circumstances, love and happiness. He was entangled in their lives so deeply, to seek revenge against them was to seek revenge against himself. To condemn and punish them was to condemn and punish himself.

Yet he was certainly angry enough to condemn and punish, and now that he recalled the way Simon touched her, the way Isabella shared with him the full openness of her eyes—a look he thought until that moment belonged entirely to him—here wrath revisited him.

And again he screamed into the rafters.

And then screamed some more.

Nothing he could do, he came to realize, would leave him in peace.

He now better understood what drove Hamlet so sideways and upside down. To forgive his duplicitous brother and his duplicitous wife would be in words only. Words words words, and nothing more. To condone their feelings for each other, to say, Who am I to struggle against your desire, your passion? Who am I to dissuade you from what your love demands? would only result in Bloom going more mad than he already felt.

No, he wouldn’t be so beneficent. He wouldn’t be so accommodating. Nor would he risk repeating the past. He wouldn’t give himself over to superstition and orders of predestination and replay the story of his mother and Leah, of his father and Freed.

The option he preferred, therefore, was to do nothing.

And here he contemplated the paradox of Abraham’s faith.

He chose to believe in their conscience. He chose to believe that by doing nothing he would leave them to dwell in their transgression alone. Every time they looked at each other, touched each other, so much as had a wanting thought of the other, he would leave them room to suffer their guilt and shame.

He was assured enough in Isabella, at least, that no matter how her concerns had been altered, she was a woman of conscience. She would never forget how devoted Bloom had been to her. She wouldn’t be capable of disregarding his kindness and compassion. His love. Their memories together, no matter how hard she tried to ignore them, he was certain, would eventually devour her.

And so, before he left Manuel’s chamber the following morning, he was decided. He would say nothing. He would do nothing. He would pretend he had seen nothing. As if it never happened. But he wouldn’t forget, and his eyes would remain open.

*   *   *

When Bloom climbed out of the cellar, he poured himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen and carried it through to the parlor. Meralda had opened all the windows and doors, but the house still smelled of stale champagne and tobacco smoke, of sweat and tinctures of a variety of perfumes. Bloom reclined in his father’s chair with thoughts of drifting off to sleep, but after he’d taken only a sip of his coffee, Isabella entered and with exasperation and some relief said, There you are!

Here I am!

Where have you been?

I went for a walk.

You just left.

I did. I walked away.

Without a word?

It would seem you and Gottlieb were right to have been worried about me last night. And now it’s confirmed. I’m not good in a crowd.

Isabella shook her head. She walked over to the chair and sat on its arm with her back to Bloom. I really thought it would do you some good to mingle with people. She looked over her shoulder to glower at him. I certainly didn’t think it would do you any harm. And then, the way you looked at me in the courtyard …

How?

As if you despised me. Reviled me.

No, said Bloom. You’re mistaken.

No, said Isabella. I’m not.

It was only my confusion you saw. I didn’t know what to make of you in that scene.

No, you didn’t see your face.

Nor did you see yours.

What was it you saw that caused you to react as you did?

It’s what I didn’t see, said Bloom. I hardly recognized you. I didn’t know you.

But that was me.

No, said Bloom, it wasn’t.

Is it really so hard to grasp that I sometimes flit around a party to gossip and joke? Is it really so perplexing I take an interest in people?

That, said Bloom, I understand. What I don’t understand, what I find baffling, is that you’ve chosen artifice and pretense over every other part of you. The vital parts of you I just happen to love most of all. You’ve hidden that Isabella somewhere far away from me.

To this Isabella said nothing.

Is she still here? asked Bloom. Somewhere nearby?

Isabella glanced back at Bloom and said curtly, I don’t know.

On the off chance she is, would you convey a message?

What?

I miss her.

Isabella sighed.

Would you tell her I’d like to be reacquainted with her.

She sighed again.

And while you’re at it, will you ask her if she’d visit my studio?

This solicited a huff. When?

Later this afternoon?

I’ll see what I can do.

If you don’t think you can …

I said, I’ll see what I can do.

Good, said Bloom.

In a tone of surrender, Isabella said, What time shall I tell her?

One o’clock?

One o’clock.

*   *   *

Bloom spent the remainder of the morning posting on the walls of his studio the collection of panels he’d drawn for The Death of Paradise. He set them in a linear progression moving left to right around the room. Scene by scene. Act by act. On his table, he stacked the specifications for each set; the costume patterns; the lighting diagrams; the camera positions; every aspect of the production he had mulled over again and again since he had taken it on: all of this, he organized for Isabella to see, to touch, to dwell on. As one o’clock approached there was a small part of him that wondered if she would make their appointment. She had no idea what he had in mind, yet he thought there might be some reluctance on her part to return to him as she once was, to take a step back in time to revisit an aspect of herself she had gone to such great lengths to bury. But there she was at one o’clock, looking up to him as she walked up the stairs to the studio. He greeted her at the door and took her by the hand, and with their fingers intertwined he walked her to the opening panel. She reached out and touched it, and said to him, It’s as if Manuel had drawn it himself.

No, said Bloom.

Yes, said Isabella. It’s as if you and he were the same.

He directed her eye around the room with his hand. I can use your help, he said.

In what way?

I can’t see it any longer.

See what?

What’s missing. What’s wrong. What’s inadequate.

Isabella began to walk along the progression of events. But it’s all here. It’s all here, beautifully rendered. Perfectly arresting.

Please, said Bloom, keep looking.

I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to be looking for. What more can I possibly say that you haven’t already said in each of these images?

Take it all in and then start again from the beginning. Don’t look for what’s right. Try to find what’s missing. If there are any expectations I’m not living up to in your mind. Try to imagine them for yourself. See into it as if you were the one responsible for drawing them.

And on Isabella walked and completed her first revolution around the room. When she finished, Bloom said, Again. And when she finished for the second time, he said, And again and again, until you can see it right away, altogether, at once.

Right away, altogether, at once? said Isabella.

Yes, said Bloom. Take it all in, so you can see it play out all at once in your mind.

Isabella went around for a third time, and then without Bloom saying a word, she went about again.

Can you see it yet?

Yes, she said. As you said. Right away, altogether, at once.

A tablet, she said.

Excuse me?

A tablet. And something to write with.

Bloom handed her a tablet and a pencil, and on Isabella went, looking and writing down what came to mind.

*   *   *

Isabella stayed in that night. They sat together in the dining room and talked over The Death of Paradise in as many dimensions as they could think of. They began with its broadest elements. Isabella was of the opinion that Bloom had placed too much emphasis on Manuel’s point of view in the second act. She argued that equal weight should be distributed among the three principal characters. Otherwise, the final scene, in which Miranda and Manuel were murdered by Fernando, wouldn’t resonate with authentic emotion. At the moment, she thought Fernando too much a monster, Miranda too much a pawn in Manuel’s fantasies. Instead of Manuel standing on his own, observing, as it is now, she said, all three of them should be present throughout, and given a full voice, as it were.

Fernando, perhaps, takes part at the massacre. Leads the soldiers. Gives the orders. Miranda, she can witness it from a distance, and show little concern for what’s taking place. I can see her bothered by the inconvenience of having to wait yet another day to be settled at the end of her long journey. As if the clearing of the land were a pesky nuisance. And then there is Manuel, who you’ve treated exactly as he should be. The reluctant witness, the voice of reason, of conscience, who later dwells in his fantasies of Miranda in order to escape the haunting images he’s seen, then turns the pathetic coward.

As for the soldiers, she continued, you would be amazed how casually men like these take to violence, how so many of them are inured to the savage acts they perpetrate. You’ve depicted them as wild beasts, but in reality, they would be used to inflicting pain and death. They would be numb to it, as familiar with the sickening stench of blood as any man who labors in an abattoir. They would hardly think anything of it to wear the blood of their victims on their armor for weeks at a time. More likely, they would be cold and methodical on the surface, indifferent to the suffering of the people they’ve destroyed.

*   *   *

They went on talking at length in the parlor after dinner, and for the first time in quite a long time, they went to bed together and held each other in their sleep. When they awoke the following morning, they took their coffee and their breakfast in the tower, and then went to the studio, where they continued to speculate about the movement of the narrative, and soon Bloom began to draft all the changes Isabella had recommended. He neither agreed nor disagreed with them, but he wanted to make them because he had managed to engage her. He had decided this picture would belong to her as much as it belonged to him.

They would now start the story in the past’s present, with its emphasis on Don Fernando. They would begin with him and treat him as they would a saint. A man who had for many years governed his territory justly; a man who had sent his crops to the neediest of the surrounding pueblos. Housed the poor. Built a cathedral in which all were welcome to worship and take refuge.

To complicate matters, his old henchman, Roberto, would then arrive on the estate after a long absence to blackmail Fernando. He would threaten to reveal all the dark secrets of his past if he didn’t provide him a portion of his land and some livestock. Fernando would agree to this, but before he delivered on his word, the picture would return to the past. To the time of Fernando, Miranda, and Manuel’s youth. When Fernando’s money and power gave him an inflated sense of importance; when Miranda saw only the promise of Fernando’s position and nothing of his demeanor; when Manuel saw both of them for who and what they were, but forgave them for the promise of a better future.

In a series of short scenes, Fernando would be exposed as the hateful character he once was, the man quick to take a life at the slightest threat to his pride; Miranda an entitled beauty who expected the world to be given to her; Manuel, attached to his work, in desperate search of an opportunity to breathe life into the visions he carried around in his mind and his notebooks. And then would arrive the confluence of events following Fernando’s exile. Fernando would turn brutal tyrant, destroyer of men, venal public official, Miranda’s jailor. Miranda would turn caged bird looking to gain its freedom. Manuel would attain all he had strived for, then betray those who had provided him his chance. All of which would lead to the murders of Miranda, Manuel, and Adora, to Fernando’s crisis of conscience. The haunting of Don Fernando by Miranda’s ghost. She would show him what great suffering he was responsible for, take him on a journey through the evils of his past, an odyssey that would forge a path to his redemption. When Fernando had been convincingly transformed, the picture would return to its present, at which point Fernando would confront Roberto. He would refuse him the land and livestock he sought, and in doing so, Roberto would grow agitated and slay Fernando. And in the end, Fernando would be venerated and condemned equally, as devil and saint, by the very people he had subjected to death and destruction.

*   *   *

They now held up these images and this progression of events above those Bloom had posted to the walls of his studio and they saw two versions of the same story, and they were satisfied with the work they had done together.

*   *   *

They began filming The Death of Paradise some weeks later. Isabella accompanied Bloom every morning to the sets, and over Gottlieb’s objections, she helped Bloom keep all the details of the production in order. Without asking anyone’s permission, she began briefing the crew and the actors every morning about how the day would proceed, and because she played a significant part in creating the vision of the picture, and often knew what Gottlieb would be asking of them, she coached them on what they could expect from their mercurial director. In turn, both the crew and the actors were often able to provide Gottlieb what he asked of them in the first take. Isabella thrived on the work, and she and Bloom found themselves as happy and connected as they had been when Isabella first arrived on Mount Terminus with Dr. Straight. They had reached such a level of contentment, Bloom convinced himself what he’d seen in Manuel’s chamber on the night of the party was little more than an innocent moment between brother and sister. If it was anything more than that, if it were a scene from an affair, he preferred not to know, preferred not to ask. Even if he had learned this was the case, he no longer cared, as Isabella, of her own free will, had chosen to return to him, and this was most important of all. She preferred to stay in with him at night, and on those occasions Bloom felt she had become restless and needed to escape Mount Terminus, he found it within himself to overcome his discomfort with the world at large, and accompany her to town after they had completed their work for the day, and there he would walk with her, look into shop windows, take in a picture show, a meal. He even summoned the wherewithal to accept a dinner invitation on Isabella’s behalf, and he began to learn through his wife’s example—not unlike what Gottlieb’s Myron Bishop had learned from the woman of his affection—how to tolerate the company of people with whom he wouldn’t otherwise choose to spend time. He discovered how easy it was to remain silent—to play the role of the observer—when in a room full of people who had cast themselves at the center of their own little dramas and comedies. Bloom would never become entirely comfortable in the society where Isabella circulated, but he would learn to accept it, well enough, so on his own volition, he asked Isabella to teach him how to dance.

They set up the Victrola in the courtyard, and for some weeks after a late dinner Isabella taught him how to fox-trot, and when Bloom believed he was able to dance without needing to apply his mind to the steps, they drove down the mountain and into town to a music hall, where they danced into the night.

When on a short visit to the set one afternoon, Simon, upon seeing what harmony had returned to their marriage, started to drop in for dinner at the villa several times a week, usually on his own, occasionally with a companion. Bloom noticed from time to time Isabella and Simon exchanging glances; every now and again they would linger on each other’s eyes for a while, then move on. But Bloom felt affirmed enough in his connection to his wife, he allowed them this small thrill, as each time Simon came and went, Bloom benefited from a change in Isabella’s spirit. After Simon departed, she was often enlivened, but not as if she were inspired by his brother’s presence, rather as if she were trying to counteract an urge, struggling against an unwelcome impulse. After these dinners with his brother, she grew that much more affectionate and attentive to Bloom, that much more uninhibited in her advances toward him. Perhaps he should have felt disturbed by this, but he had come to understand this inner tension Isabella needed in order to feel fully alive. He would only be able to recognize it for what it was, the hunger she tried to describe to him that day in the rose garden after she had been sequestered in the gallery all those months. He could only guess it was an inner turmoil derived from having witnessed how random and anarchic was the logic of Death, how indiscriminate and blind it was in its selection of the living. After having lived in the face of such a dark force, after experiencing the darkest human behavior, he presumed, she would never be fully satisfied with peace and tranquility alone. She had witnessed in her brief existence too many enlightened people shatter their most sacred values.

*   *   *

One night after Simon had visited, Bloom found Isabella had lapsed into a mood as serious as the one he found her in when she first returned to Mount Terminus after the war. As they lay together in bed, in the dark, Bloom asked her what was the matter. There’s something I need to tell you, she said. When Bloom asked what it was she needed to say, she told him how she feared to begin. To this, Bloom said nothing. He waited. And waited. And eventually Isabella began to speak. She confided in Bloom about the events that had precipitated the nervous exhaustion she experienced when she came to after her accident. She was alone, she told Bloom. She shouldn’t have been alone. But she was. She was transporting to the hospital a man she believed to be a wounded French soldier. The man had a head wound, serious, but one from which he would recover. He lay unconscious on a cot in the back of the ambulance as Isabella drove through wheat fields overgrown from neglect. Halfway between the battlefield and the hospital, she heard the soldier rouse to his feet, and she told him he should lie back and rest until they arrived. He wasn’t in a state to be sitting up. When she turned to see if he had done as she asked, she found the point of a bayonet at her nose. The man spoke to her in German and calmly gestured to the side of the road. When she had pulled the ambulance over, the soldier pushed her out of her seat onto the muddy shoulder. He marched her out into one of the fields, through tall stalks of grain, and again he pushed her, down onto her back. She could see he wasn’t interested in having her, rather, she could see, from the cold, lifeless expression on his face, he simply intended to kill her and take the ambulance. He turned his rifle on her now, and without acknowledging that before him lay prostrate a human being, he pulled the trigger. Until that moment, she told Bloom, she hadn’t feared death. She hadn’t felt it a threat to her. In fact, given what she had seen, what she had documented, given the death of Dr. Straight and his wife, a small part of her had wished it upon herself. But when the rifle misfired, she felt all the apprehension one would expect to feel when confronted with one’s own end, and she wanted more than anything to live. The soldier’s face was unchanged, but Isabella’s spirit had been altered. She didn’t want to die. Not there. Not then. And so when the man raised the bayonet to check his weapon, she took hold of a rock she felt pressing into the small of her back, and charged the soldier. She sprang up so quickly, in his lethargic state he didn’t have time to lower his weapon, and Isabella hit him hard where his head had already been concussed. She continued to beat him back with heavier and heavier blows until he dropped his weapon and fell, and when he fell, she picked up the rifle and turned the bayonet on him. It all happened so quickly, she told Bloom. She pointed the bayonet at his chest and instinctively lunged with all her weight bearing down on him. She drove the blackened blade between his ribs and did as she had seen the soldiers do on the battlefield: she twisted it and twisted it, back and forth, removed it, plunged it in again, twisted and twisted. She felt cartilage resist the blade. She felt the blade scrape and crack bone. She then lunged some more. She lunged and lunged until the man became still, and she continued to twist and lunge until she heard his last breath expel from his lungs, saw the skin around his eyes relax, smelled the putrid evacuation of his bowels. Isabella became silent at this point. Bloom had been holding her as she spoke and now held her tighter. What troubled her, she told Bloom next, was what she hadn’t felt when she had acknowledged to herself what she had done. It was what she couldn’t feel that preoccupied her so much when she walked back to the ambulance and started driving. For having taken this man’s life, she felt neither remorse nor regret. She felt absolutely nothing, as lifeless as the expression on the soldier’s face when he pulled the rifle’s trigger. And it was the thought of the absence of feeling that distracted her from the road, from not seeing the ditch she drove into.

And when she awoke after the accident, it wasn’t her injury or the memory of the death she had seen on such a monumental scale that had so deeply affected her. Her affliction was the absence of conscience. The voice. That small, rational voice that resided in her innermost thoughts had disappeared. She had been reshaped, delivered to a void whose weightless vacuum she had no power to maneuver within. She was frequently horrified by the memory of the killing itself, how it felt when she lodged the blade between the man’s ribs, the rank smell of him, the sound of him gasping for breath when his lung had been punctured, the image of him choking on his own blood, but she had yet to feel as if she had acted in an unnatural way. She so very much expected her inner voice to intervene, to plague her in some manner, but each time she recalled the killing in her mind, she admitted to reliving not the torment for having acted against God, but the triumph of having done away with her attacker before he could do away with her. She could still recall the great relief she enjoyed when she had overcome him and was given the chance to live. Never again, she told Bloom, would she hold herself above human fallibility and weakness. And while she abided by the laws of men, she could never again live in harmony with the mores of a civilized society. I often feel lost, she told Bloom. As if I’m balancing between two opposing worlds.

You’re not lost to me, said Bloom.

But I am, she said. I am.

No.

I’m afraid I am.

I would have been much more disturbed if you hadn’t fought to save yourself.

But I’m no longer the girl you fell in love with. I’m certain you know that to be true.

It doesn’t matter.

A Pandora’s box has opened inside me and I don’t know how to close it.

Bloom reminded her what resided at the bottom of that box, and Isabella said, No, you don’t understand. She took hold of Bloom’s hand and lowered it to just above her waist. Feel, she said. She pressed his hand harder against her midriff and then moved it about its circumference. Bloom could feel how its shape had changed. How hadn’t he noticed? She was swelling. Stretching. The body whose every feature he had committed to memory was transforming into an unfamiliar shape. Before he could become excited about what he was feeling in his palm, on his fingertips, Isabella said, It’s been some time now. Understand?

Bloom felt the sensation of ice melting on the back of his neck.

I’ve been this way for quite some time, she said. Longer than the time we’ve recently spent together.

I see.

Do you?

Yes. I do. Bloom now understood. He now comprehended in all its complexities what Isabella had just confessed to him. She had known that night of the party. Had Simon known as well? Of course he did. Of course …

Bloom instinctively started to remove himself from Isabella’s arms, but she refused to let him go. With a strength he didn’t know she had, she grabbed hold of him and held tight. She interlocked her fingers with his, and she said, Whatever you decide tomorrow, I’ll do. But tonight, please, just tonight …

*   *   *

Neither of them slept. Neither of them said another word until dawn. All night Isabella clutched hold of Bloom’s hand, and Bloom didn’t struggle to release it. He felt the warmth of her body against his, the weight of her breasts pressed against his back, but her presence was ghostly. Many times that night he recalled the first moment he saw Isabella in the mirror given to him as a gift by Dr. Straight. And he wondered which Isabella belonged to him. The image of her true self or the image of herself in reverse. He searched his mind for the smallest of alterations of her appearance. And he wondered which of her belonged to Simon. And he wondered which of her belonged to him. And he wondered what he should do. He had so many questions, but when he thought of posing these questions to Isabella, he refrained, because, even if he didn’t know the answers, he knew the outcome; he knew in what direction this sort of conversation would take them. And he refused to take that well-worn path. He refused to make his fate the fate of his mother and his aunt. He refused to repeat the all-too-obvious patterns of the past. He chose instead to honor the promise he had made to his father when he was a child. Blessed art thou, O Lord Our God, Ruler of the Universe, may I protect my love better than he protected his. He chose to let his love for Isabella prevail over all else. He wouldn’t bend to his primal nature. He wouldn’t bend to tragedy’s architecture. He would allow Isabella her flaws. He would tolerate the duality of her character. He would learn to forget her deception. He would love the child growing inside her as if it were his own. He would forgive his brother for his weakness. He would embrace him as the child’s true father. I am a student of the invertiscope, he tried to convince himself. I am its subject. I am its embodiment. He would simply be better, better than all the protagonists in all the world’s tragedies who had given themselves over to their basest passions. In all the ways his father was unable to protect his mother, he would protect Isabella, first and foremost, from himself. When the sun broke through the bedroom windows and shone its light onto Isabella’s face, she asked Bloom if she should pack her things and leave.

To this, Bloom said, No.

What then?

Nothing. We’ll do nothing. I can forgive you, he said in a voice as convincing as the voice Isabella had used when she asked Bloom to ask her to marry him. And he told her he could forgive Simon. And he told her he could love the child as if it were his own. And then he asked if Simon knew.

And she said that he did. He knew she was pregnant. But he didn’t know that there was no question about who the father was. He thought there was a chance that it was Bloom’s.

Then he must be told, said Bloom.

Must he?

Bloom didn’t have the answer to this question. He only had another question. There’s only one thing I need to know, he said.

What’s that?

I don’t want to know why, but I must know: are you certain it’s me you want to be with and not him?

Yes. With you. Without reservation.

Why? he was tempted to ask, but instead said, Then that’s the way it will be.

*   *   *

That morning they returned to the studio lot down the hill and continued their work. They were exhausted and at times distracted by what had passed in the night. They had thus far introduced all their principal characters and completed the scenes set within the Spanish court of King Philip. The events preceding Fernando and Miranda’s expulsion had been completed, as had the scenes depicting Manuel’s work as an apprentice to a master builder. On this day, Bloom sat perched on a crane with Gottlieb and his new cameraman, Roland Briggs. Together they overlooked the deck of a balsa wood replica of the Estrella del Mar mounted to a fulcrum, at either end of which members of the crew took turns squatting and lifting to approximate the ship falling and rising over the ocean current. An industrial-sized fan blew the sails full of wind, and when the jib boom dipped into the sea, a fire line of men with buckets heaved water up onto the starboard and port. It was a tedious morning followed by a tedious afternoon, one during which Bloom withdrew into the scrolling backdrop of the sea. He could feel himself roiling with the slow movement of the passing waves. Unwanted images of Simon and Isabella appeared. He couldn’t help but imagine his brother’s seed taking root inside his wife, forming in the well of her a growing replica of his brother, of Bloom. The more he dwelled on these thoughts, the better he comprehended the nexus of his mother’s madness. He understood what drove her to Sam Freed’s house that day to claim Simon as her own. How, he wondered, would he manage this without losing his mind? I am a student of the invertiscope, he reminded himself. Its subject. Its embodiment. But would he be able to inhibit his basest nature before cold, rational reason took hold and made him a better man? The actions of Isabella and Simon, he could forgive, but these images he had invited would not cease. They only grew more vibrant and real. No matter how concerted his effort to act in a loving and sympathetic manner toward Isabella in the days that followed, when night fell and they turned in to bed, he saw Simon mounting her, entering her, taking from her the most intimate and animalistic part of herself, taking from Bloom what was his. He grew so disturbed and outraged by these thoughts, he needed to remove himself from their room, and on many occasions, he was tempted to get into his car, to drive down the mountain, to confront Simon, to ask him why he had undermined the love he felt for the two people he cherished most in the world. Was he still motivated, Bloom wondered, by his residual anger toward Jacob? Or did Bloom in some way unknowingly earn Simon’s scorn, as Rachel had earned Leah’s? Or was it simpler than that? Was it possible his changed wife had fallen in love with Simon, with the complexity of his fractured self, and had Simon fallen in love with Isabella for that very same reason? Was it only their concern for him that was keeping them apart?

Night after night, Bloom walked to Mount Terminus’s peak and sat there until his temper quieted, and he then returned to his bed before daybreak so Isabella wouldn’t have cause to feel concerned. He did this for weeks, exhausted his body to such an extent he exhausted his anger. And with his anger exhausted, he was able to imagine himself as Simon. He was able to empathize with him. Unconditionally. He was able to rationalize a world in which he had given over his responsibility for his troubled wife to his brother. And he recalled what he saw in Manuel’s secret room. In what way the connection between Isabella and Simon was authentic. And he recalled what Simon had sacrificed the night of the party, when, in effect, he returned her to Bloom. And when he was able to perceive their family drama from this point of view, he was grateful to Simon. The images of his brother lying with his wife began to recede, their focus softened, but, night after night when Bloom rejoined Isabella in their bed, he was now awakened in the dark by the same dream he had when Simon returned to Mount Terminus after Jacob and Sam had passed away. Night after night, he dreamed of the mirrored villa filled with his distorted image, of the tower crumbling and rushing asunder, and each time he awoke with a start, an image of Isabella and Simon’s child, born and alive, and aging into a man, into a woman, appeared in Bloom’s mind. And night after night, he was struck by the same thought. Simon had willingly sacrificed the love of a woman who didn’t rightly belong to him, but what of the love of a child who did? If there was no doubt about who the baby’s father was, would he remain amicable? Or would he become the man whose omniscient gaze peered out from the heights of billboards overlooking the basin and the sea?

*   *   *

On a morning Bloom was meant to be driving out to meet his crew in the far reaches of the valley—where Gottlieb had found a location that resembled the drawings Bloom had made for the Mount Terminus massacre—he discovered his father’s old business associate Saul Geller waiting for him in the parlor. The man looked in good health, but his demeanor at the moment was sickly. He appeared as Bloom did, as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. He nevertheless possessed the same warmth Bloom remembered from the time they sat in the courtyard for the reading of Jacob’s will. Bloom told Mr. Geller what a pleasure it was to see him again, and he explained he was in a rush. He was expected within the hour, and, as it was, he was already going to be late. He wondered if Mr. Geller could wait to meet with him later in the day. Geller took hold of Bloom’s arm and apologized to him. He said it was imperative that they speak now. Please, the older man asked, when is the last time you saw our Mr. Stern?

Bloom told him it had been some time. Stern, he explained, had, in the past few years, taken to sending couriers with written reports, which Bloom admitted to never having read.

Geller stood up and walked to the sideboard on which Meralda had left Jacob’s crystal glasses and a decanter filled with schnapps, and he poured himself a drink, and then poured one for Bloom. When he handed Bloom the tumbler, Bloom reminded Geller he had just started his day. Trust me, Joseph, you’ll want the drink before I deliver the news I have.

What is it? Has something bad happened to Mr. Stern?

If only that were the case. I would consider it a blessing. Geller shook his head and drank. A few weeks ago, I received a distressing letter from Stern. I want you to understand, I have no way of verifying if what he says about certain parties mentioned is accurate. I’m only relating to you what he wrote to me … Please, Joseph … Geller pushed the bottom of Bloom’s glass to his lips. Drink.

Bloom, now sensing the news Mr. Geller had come all this way to deliver was as bad as he claimed, and because he thought it would be impolite not to, drank.

The short of it, said Geller, is that Stern has cleaned you out. This much of what he has written to me I can verify. The man has taken you for everything. Your entire inheritance, it’s all gone.

Bloom felt the uncanny sensation of blood rushing out of his head. His thoughts departed from the room for a moment, and when they returned, he said, Mr. Stern? We are talking about Mr. Stern?

Yes. There is no mistake about it. Mr. Stern, our stern Mr. Stern, has liquidated all your assets. He has raided all your accounts and emptied all your deposit boxes. He has even gone so far as to sell off all the land surrounding the estate. Every square inch of it. He’s left you with this property, your home in Woodhaven, and only because he would have required my approval, he left you the controlling interest in our company. Little, very little meat remains on the bone.

Our Mr. Stern?

Yes, said Geller, our Mr. Stern.

Bloom took a seat on the sofa and looked into his now empty tumbler. To the many images of his face reflected in the crystalline diamonds that formed the glass’s smooth surface, he said, I’m shocked.

Of course you are. We all are.

I protected him when he needed a confidant. He looked up to Geller as he might have to a rabbi. What have I done to him that he would feel the need to do this to me?

So far as I know? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He’s simply lost his head … over a woman.

A woman, said Bloom. Of course, he thought, the woman. The woman Stern never believed would give him the time of day. That same woman who appeared to think nothing of him whatsoever, a caterpillar crushed on the sole of her shoe.

He mentioned in his letter that you know of the woman.

Yes, I know of the woman. But, as far as I knew, he was finished with her, and she was finished with him. So far as I understood it, there was nothing between them to begin with. The woman, he explained, was a prop, an actor, Simon’s leverage to blackmail Stern. Simon, he explained, needed Bloom’s money to keep his enterprise afloat, and his brother rightly perceived Stern as an impediment to getting what he needed.

Well, on that score, said Geller, you came out well. Stern made a point of saying this. He was considerate to spare your feelings where your brother was concerned.

It turns out he needn’t have, said Bloom.

As Geller spoke of short-term losses and long-term gains, of rates of return, Bloom once again fixed his attention to the images of his face at the bottom of his glass. For his deceitful behavior, you can fault Simon, said Geller, and, I imagine, if you want to hold him responsible for the unintended consequences. Had it not been for the ways in which your brother inspired Stern, Simon’s manipulation would have done you no harm at all. His example, on the other hand, for that you can hold him accountable. Our Mr. Stern, it seems, had fallen in love with the conniving seductress. And he pursued her after the fact. The problem was he couldn’t afford her. So he took it where he could get it. When he saw how easy it was to manipulate your money without you having taken notice—not that I’m casting blame, mind you—he started scavenging your fortune. After Simon had paid back the money he had taken, Stern gradually moved it into one of his own accounts. In small amounts at first, then larger and larger amounts. The next thing he knew, he was liquidating the remainder of your investments and assets, buying property abroad under false names, moving your funds to accounts under the same false identities, and now he’s disappeared to God-knows-where with that woman.

Our Mr. Stern?

Yes, said Geller, our Mr. Stern.

Bloom could only shake his head at the thought of it.

I’ve informed the authorities and I’ve retained a team of investigators, but, if I’m to be honest, Joseph, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Stern is a clever man and it would seem he’s highly motivated not to be found. Geller lifted the glass out of Bloom’s hand and he returned to the schnapps for a second go. I’m so sorry, said Geller as he handed Bloom the drink. I swore to your father I would look after you, and this, this is what happens.

Bloom was dumbfounded. He wasn’t certain what to think about the loss of the money. What did he know of money? He was hardly an extravagant spender. Whatever income was left from the company, he speculated, would suffice. And he told Geller as much. You shouldn’t blame yourself, he said to his father’s old friend.

But I do blame myself. Who else, if not me, is there to blame?

Mr. Stern.

Yes, but it was I who insisted Stern handle your affairs to begin with. It was I who built this house of cards.

There’s no way you could have known it would come to this.

No. But I am responsible. It was my doing. And I’ve decided. I want you to have the shares in the company your father gave to me after he died. I think it’s the least I can do to compensate you for such a great loss.

No, I won’t hear of it.

You must think of your future, Joseph. You have a wife now. Soon you’ll have a family of your own.

Bloom’s eyes returned to the empty bottom of the glass, to the multitude of eyes staring back at him.

The income from the foundry? It’s nothing to sneeze at, said Geller. But it’s not the legacy your father left you. He would have never said it out loud, but he was proud of the fact that you and the children who follow you would want for nothing. And now …

I will still want for nothing. There is nothing more I want.

That is the shock speaking, said Geller. When your head has cleared, we’ll revisit this conversation. For now, let’s leave it.

*   *   *

After expressing further distress and dismay, after making one too many apologies, Saul Geller departed that morning. He was off to meet the investigators to search through Stern’s office and home in hope of finding some clue as to where he’d absconded with Bloom’s inheritance and the man-eating Marianne Merriweather. And Bloom went off in search of Isabella. He felt compelled to share Geller’s news with her. For the briefest of moments he forgot all the ways in which their life together had been upended, and he wanted her to comfort him, to tell him they would see their way through. But as he ascended the stairs to the landing, Bloom grew increasingly agitated. His only thought was what would become of Mount Terminus. The parcels of land Stern had sold would be developed. It was inevitable. A fait accompli. He easily imagined the city overrunning the mountain. He saw in his mind the physical structures taking shape. He imagined the noise of people overwhelming his peace of mind. And he was reminded of his father’s last months, his last days, during which he packed his ears with cotton and sought refuge in the gallery. Bloom better understood now. He better comprehended what was lost to Jacob, what it was that had driven him so deep into the interior of his home. He wasn’t merely mourning the loss of his wife; he wasn’t merely dwelling in the darkness of regret; he was grieving the end of silence. The silence that had renewed Rachel during their happiest days on Mount Terminus. The silence he dreamed of as a boy in the orphanage. The silence that lasted days on end. And, oh, how Bloom wished he could return the silence to the open vistas, to the open land that ran to the sea and out into the valley, as far out as the dam that now held back the waters of Pacheta Lake. How he wished his brother were a simple man, a man of smaller ambitions, of smaller stature, a man of little means and little experience, a man who held Bloom in esteem, who considered his marriage sacred, who would have shrunk at the thought of touching his wife. Oh, how Bloom wished his father had never gone in search of his aunt after he and his mother had been reunited. How he wished his brother never existed. How he wished he could make him disappear, reduce him to a puff of smoke, a mere shadow in Gottlieb’s cave. When Bloom saw Isabella sitting in the gallery, in his mother’s chair, her shoulders wrapped in his mother’s paisley shawl, her eyes gazing on the outline of Rachel’s form in the window overlooking Woodhaven’s lake, Bloom couldn’t bring himself to subject her to the dybbuk taking hold of him. He would not allow any malcontent spirit to disturb the glow of her motherhood, of her future with her child. He stood and stared at her from the threshold, and then quietly backed away. As noiselessly as Roya, he withdrew, past the library in which he had spent so much time, he withdrew down the stairs to the kitchen and took in the sight of Gus and Meralda looking lovingly at each other from across the table. He would not disturb them either. He walked out the front door, turned over the engine of his car, and sat behind the wheel. As he was about to drive off, he looked up to see Roya looking down on him from the tower’s pavilion. What happened next, Bloom wouldn’t fully comprehend for as long as he lived. At the moment he was about to wave farewell to her, he noticed Roya had, cupped in her hands, Elijah, who, upon seeing Bloom, tried to break the hold she had on him. Roya gave Bloom’s clever bird a kiss on his crest to quiet him, and when she lifted her head, something came over Elijah. He began to peck at Roya’s hands. He managed to free one wing, and then the other, and with a final peck directed at Roya’s nose, he was free. Bloom’s silent companion ran to the rail and let out a silent scream as Elijah tumbled forward. He fell over once and then twice, and then Bloom witnessed Elijah’s wings spread. His crest retracted to face the offshore breeze, and for the first time since Mr. Geller delivered his aviary to the tower’s pavilion, Bloom watched the beauty of this bird take flight. Elijah circled about the gardens for a few moments, turned back, swooped over Bloom’s head, and then flapped on toward Mount Terminus’s open gates, and out and up along the mountain road that led to the summit. Bloom threw the roadster into gear, and, with little else on his mind other than the thought of retrieving his beloved friend, sped after him. Elijah flew up and around and kept pace with the car, doubled back every now and again, as if he were intentionally leading Bloom up and over the peak to the valley. Bloom waved his free hand and screamed out Elijah’s name over the engine’s whine and grind. Elijah, he called. Elijah, I need you here with me. Elijah, who appeared to look down at Bloom from time to time, arced over the mountain and down the canyon switchback, leading Bloom on his descent into the valley. Elijah, Bloom called. Please. Please, come back to me! He lost sight of him as the cockatiel dipped down into the canyon, and he would then suddenly reappear in a long sweep up over the road, and dive down again. Please, Bloom called out, this world isn’t for you! And on Elijah flew, paying Bloom no mind at all. For a while the bird flew so high, he blended in with the wisps of haze brushing the washed-out blue of the desert sky. But Bloom felt him up there, felt his presence, and he trusted Elijah would return to him, so he drove. He drove the turns, back and forth, skirting the dry bed of the rusted canyon, passing the folded mantle of chaparral that met the morning sun. He drove to the head of the steep grade of the straightaway that led to the long, long valley road, at which point Elijah sailed down out of the haze, swept over Bloom’s roadster, and landed on the remains of a fir tree long ago burned in an autumn blaze. He perched himself right at the end of a blackened limb that hung out over the road. Bloom pulled over onto the road’s shoulder and turned off the motor. He held out his arm and called out to his bird, his old friend. Please, he said, I need you here with me. But Elijah wouldn’t come. He stared down at him with the same patient gaze as the buzzards of Pacheta Lake who covered his father in the shadow of their heraldic poses and guarded his juniper trees. And Bloom sat looking over the valley with Elijah, and waited and watched, as he did on those days he spent with his father during the Days of Awe, on Yom Kippur. And he was reminded of the mountain’s melt cascading down volcanic craters, pressing its way through canyon and gorge, feeding the river that flowed into the graben of the rift valley, and he recalled how the waters had been diverted into the irrigation canals at the desert’s edge, and the ways in which his brother had diverted the water through the aqueduct to the immense face of the dam, and he saw his brother’s shadow over the world he had delivered to Mount Terminus, with its myriad intended and unintended consequences, and was convinced now, more than ever before, the choice he and Isabella had made together, to remain united as one, was an illusion. For Simon was no simple man. He was no humble man. He had grown so enormous in size he could hardly be considered a man at all. His image had come to hold as many meanings as there were people beholding it; he had become an idol of old, a golden calf worshipped and adored, the producer of dreams at the desolate end of the world, the shaper of implausible destinies, the man who moved living waters to make paradise on Earth, the emperor, the pharaoh, the deity, Simon Reuben. And Bloom had come to know what lived behind his brother’s many masks. He knew what formed the core of his humanity, he knew what motivated him, and he knew Simon would never allow Bloom to raise his child. This shaper of the impossible would sooner sacrifice Bloom as a brother before he turned into Jacob Rosenbloom, the abandoner, the missing part, the mysterious ghost. He would not be subject to twists of dramatic irony. He would fight for the child. And, no matter how much he claimed to love Bloom, he would fight for Isabella. Here, thought Bloom, were the unintended consequences of this thread of the tale. Here was the truth of the matter. Here was why stories such as these were told. Here was why men fought bloody battles. Here was why Troy fell. Here was why students of the invertiscope were little more than innocent boys hanging precariously from limbs of trees, filling baskets with acorns in an Eden that had long ago closed up shop.

And then it happened. The unexplainable moment whose timing Bloom would marvel at for as long as he lived. Why, he would ask himself, was he not down there, but up here on the heights of the straightaway? Had Stern not stolen his money, had Elijah not felt an instinctual need to rest his heretofore unused wings, would he have been dead with the rest of them? Would he, too, have been claimed by his brother’s hubris? For this is what next came to pass.

Some invisible, exterior force startled Elijah. He jumped from his perch and flew off down the long narrow road in the direction of the valley. The moment after he lifted away, Bloom heard what Elijah had sensed. A percussive boom, like timpani rumbling at the edge of a passing storm, echoed and reverberated against the mountain’s face, its canyons. As Elijah’s small body began to disappear from sight, Bloom felt the ground shift under him, a tremor, the mildest of earthquakes, strong enough to wobble the roadster on its metal springs. And then he heard the onrush, whose sound was equivalent to nothing Bloom knew of in nature; it was a sound that made his ears ache; as it intensified, it transformed into a vibratory hum that bathed his skin, shook the cuffs of his pants, the sleeves of his shirt, clattered his teeth. He tried to speak, but he couldn’t hear his words. Words erupted from his mouth, but the oscillation of the pitch neutralized them. There was no rush of wind, no rustle of leaves or brush, no chips or chirps of insects or birds. Before he ever saw what was producing it, there was only the blanketing sound, an ocean of it, an entire planet’s atmosphere of it. From his vista, he could see miniature figures, ranch hands, horses, cattle, all turning northeast, looking off in the same direction. None ran. None moved at all. They just stood paralyzed. And before Bloom had a chance to think a rational thought, the sound’s source arrived, and when he saw what it was that was generating what he imagined the voice of God to sound like, Bloom said, and did not hear himself saying, Oh God. Oh God. Oh Gottlieb. Poor Gottlieb. A wall of water, fifty, seventy-five, one hundred feet high, an enormous wave of tumbling brown water, lifted, splintered, devoured all of what stood fixed on the landscape. All that the water had made possible to arise was now being reclaimed. Houses and barns lifted off foundations, tractors and trucks were tossed into the air, bodies of men and women and livestock snuffed out. Like every sentient being who had beheld the maelstrom before it arrived, Bloom, too, did not move. He thought to turn over the car’s engine. He thought to turn and run, to climb the dead tree. He could see the trajectory of the water channeling through the valley in his direction. He could see its behemoth force pressing its behemoth mass up the canyon’s straight road. He could easily imagine an arm forming from its amorphous heap, and it reach up and out to him, pull him back into the vortex of its maw. Yet he still did not move. Instead, Bloom watched the muddy head of the beast, the golem, crash against the rise of sediment and rock. He watched it funnel its force up the narrow canyon road. He watched its reach extend up at an unimaginable speed, and as it ascended to him, he knew, if he survived this moment in time, what it was he wanted. If he survived the leviathan born of his brother’s ambition, from his most feverish dreams, he knew where he would go. If he survived the End of Days foreseen by his brother’s accountant, Mr. Dershowitz, if Bloom didn’t become flotsam, or some buried archaeological curiosity for some future digger, he knew where he belonged. In this arrested moment of time, he saw it in his mind. It was clear. It was true. He knew now where it was he had experienced his truest happiness. And he knew now the rarity of true happiness. And he knew now for whom his father had decided to live apart, to abandon all. In the face of the oncoming fist, Bloom could see the desk set before the window. He could see the ocean’s vast expanse, its uninterrupted view. He could see Estella looking off to the swells rolling endlessly from the horizon. And, he thought, how blissful and at peace he had been there, how easy it would be to lead a quiet life of dreaming there. A quiet life interrupted only by the sound of the sea, the sight of Estella walking the rocks, the pleasant piano music in the evenings, fishing off the coast with Eduardo. Isabella would be free to go to Simon, and Simon would need her now. He would need someone to help see him through this atrocity. He would need her to help him understand the unmerciful ways in which Death visited the world. He would need the child to distract him and comfort him. Bloom was not so cruel as to deprive his brother of these things. Yes, thought Bloom. Yes! he screamed at Death as it rushed to him. Yes! he screamed at what he believed was his inevitable slaughter. Yes! he screamed loud enough to hear his own voice over Death’s approach. And he screamed again, Yes! when the muddy fingers were only yards away. He gripped hold of the steering wheel and shut his eyes, and he waited, and he waited, to be swept away, to be pulled in, to be overtaken, consumed, and then …

Nothing, nothing except for a misting of water kissing his face. The kiss of Death? Or was it the kiss of life? He opened his eyes to find the muddy water receding, falling back into the valley, into a roiling whirlpool of debris churning at the base of the mountain. The road below was slicked with mud, and the twisted earthly remains of cattle and horses, of men?—perhaps they were men?—began to crust over in the sun almost immediately after the retreat. Bloom thought to look, to see, if anything at all was alive, but nothing stirred, nothing groaned. He stepped out of the car to observe the scene, but he could not bear the sight. Before any more of the grotesquerie was revealed across the valley, he turned away from it. He cranked the roadster’s engine, and without another thought, Bloom circled about and drove away from this horrible world of his brother’s making. He drove up and over his beloved mountain. He slowed for only a brief moment when he approached the estate, and when he thought of looking through its gate to bid Mount Terminus one final farewell, he stopped himself and drove on, past the road leading to the plateau, and he continued down the switchback, taking turns at precarious speeds. When he reached the bottom, he drove past the gates of Mount Terminus Studios without even taking them in, and he continued on down the long stretch of road leading to the edge of the basin. He continued on through the square blocks lined with stucco homes that once stood pinned to his brother’s map. He continued on over paved roads lined with pristine curbs and perfectly appointed streetlamps, with high-tension wires cutting across shining billboards holding his brother’s image. He continued on past people who had only just become aware of what had happened on the opposite side of the mountain. They emptied out onto the streets, looked out in the direction of the valley. More and more of them congregated on their lawns, in the street, some weeping, more speechless. They sat framed in open windows, unmoving, and on he continued through the throngs, onward to the port, where he parked his car on Eduardo’s ferry, and he stood with his friend, his true brother, his fellow lover of birds, and he told this dear man he had missed him, and Eduardo embraced Bloom, and, in an effort to lighten the mood, he said to him, I have made friends with a pelican who perches on my boat in Willow Cove, and upon hearing this, Bloom was overjoyed, and with Eduardo at his side, he continued on to Santa Ynez, and he continued on around the island road in his car, and he drove under the braided ficus trees up the lane, and he parked near the strawberry lupine and amethyst blazing stars, and he greeted Guillaume hello at the foot of his trapeze, and he walked inside the home of La Reina del Fuego, and he was greeted by her, by the beautiful, melancholy Estella, who, as he was about to tell her about what horrors he had seen only hours earlier, took hold of Bloom’s hand and walked him upstairs to a room painted with pink and yellow toucans, and there she lifted up from a small bed a little girl with dark skin and dark curls hanging in ringlets over her eyes, and she placed the child in Bloom’s arms, and said, She has been waiting for you to return.