Theoretical departures

The next time the house was dark, Virgil was already awake.

He had not slept so much as lain still while the island rehearsed sleep around him. Nelly slept beside him in the long white bed, or appeared to. He could not tell anymore when her stillness belonged to rest and when it belonged to watchfulness. Her face, turned toward the open balcony, held the last blue of the night in the hollow below her cheekbone. One hand lay palm-up on the sheet. The other rested near his thigh without touching him. Even in sleep she occupied the room as a verdict. The curtains moved because the air system told them to. The water in the pool below spoke in low repetitions. Somewhere behind the walls, machines continued to keep paradise habitable.

Virgil waited for the machines to cover the first sound of his leaving.

A pump clicked on beneath the bathhouse.

He moved.

Not quickly. He had learned, during his years of theoretical departures, that speed was the first confession. He took his feet from the bed and found the rug. He sat upright. For a moment his head filled with a white roaring, not from drink this time but from altitude, age, and the animal terror of actual motion. All the old rehearsals had been luxurious. In rehearsal, one could leave forever and still be in the same room by lunch.

This was different. This had the vulgarity of happening.

On the chair beside the bed lay the clothes he had chosen while Nelly bathed after their conversation: not the handsome clothes from the cedar closet, not the linen kept for terraces and arrivals, but things with practical pockets, things that had survived being forgotten. A dark shirt. A jacket with a torn lining. Trousers that no one had pressed. A belt stiff with disuse. Socks rolled inside shoes already powdered with garage dust. He dressed by touch. The shirt smelled faintly of old drawers. The jacket smelled of paper, stale smoke, and a weather that did not belong to the island.

From the bed, Nelly breathed once, deeply.

Virgil stopped with one arm in the jacket.

The room held him.

Nelly did not wake. Or she did not show him that she had.

He drew the sleeve over his wrist. On the bedside table, beside a glass of water and three pink pills on a porcelain dish, lay the fax page. She had left it there folded exactly in half, as if it were a handkerchief. He put it inside the jacket without opening it. The paper touched his ribs through the lining. It felt neither heavy nor light. It felt official.

At the door he turned back.

The bed was enormous, absurdly low, draped in white fabric that spilled onto the floor like surf. Nelly lay in the middle of it as if the room had been built outward from her body. Her hair crossed the pillow. One shoulder had come free of the sheet. In the moonless dark her skin retained its own soft authority, not glowing, not shining, only refusing to be swallowed by shadow. She was not young in the way he had first thought. Youth was too weak a word for her. She was the island’s continuing argument against consequence.

He nearly went back.

Not from love only. Not from lust only. From the gravitational mercy of not having to begin.

Then the fax paper shifted against his ribs when he breathed.

He opened the door.

The upper hall was kept lit at night by concealed strips along the base of the walls, so that anyone walking there seemed to move through milk. Doors stood closed on both sides. Behind one door was the room where Nelly kept gifts she had not opened. Behind another was a room of clothes she no longer wore but would not allow removed. Farther down, a small salon had been arranged for a party that had ended years earlier or had never properly begun: low glasses on a tray, four chairs facing one another, flowers changed daily, no ashtrays since Nelly had once decided ashtrays encouraged endings.

Virgil passed barefoot first, shoes in hand.

At the landing he paused.

Above him the false dome of the stairwell had been painted with clouds. The clouds were peach and gold and not of any climate known to earth. A crack ran through them from the skylight to the plaster cornice. He had meant to have it repaired when it first appeared. That was perhaps eight years ago. Perhaps three. The island distorted neglect into style if given enough time.

He descended by the servants’ stair.

The first fire was waiting in a silver wastebasket.

That, too, he had prepared without admitting preparation. Months earlier, or years, he had noticed where the island stored its discarded beauty: tissue from delivered flowers, old ribbon, perfumed wrapping, dried eucalyptus, the paper sleeves of imported candles, napkins printed with names of vanished restaurants, invitation cards too thick to burn quickly and too embarrassing to throw away. The wastebasket stood in a service vestibule outside the lower linen room. Above it hung a smoke detector with its plastic cover yellowed from age. Someone had removed the battery. Or he had. Or the island had arranged to be vulnerable in the one place it believed no one would wound it.

Virgil set his shoes on the floor.

He took from his pocket a matchbook soft at the spine. On the cover was a drawing of a blue hotel that had been demolished before Nelly was born. Inside were three matches. He struck the first. It broke. The second flared and went out in the breath from the vent. The third lit with a weak sulfur flower. He held it to the corner of a white napkin embossed with a gold shell.

For a moment nothing happened.

Then the gold shell blackened, curled, and accepted the flame.

It would have been possible to stop. He could have pinched it out, placed the napkin in the sink, returned upstairs, invented a story about thirst or age or the old insomnia that Nelly found touching because it made him manageable.

Instead he fed the small flame with tissue. The tissue went at once, eager, almost grateful. Then ribbon. Then a twist of paper smelling of roses. Then the dried eucalyptus, which caught with a crackle bright and medicinal. He watched until the fire was no longer a match’s opinion but an event.

It began beautifully. That made him ashamed.

The flame climbed the inside of the basket. It tinted the white wall, doubled itself in the polished handle of a cabinet, made a little orange theater for his hand. He had started fires before, though not always with matches. A dinner. A marriage. A friendship. A book. A daughter’s childhood. Rooms he left behind had a way of becoming uninhabitable, and over the years he had confused this with proof that he mattered.

This one was only practical.

He told himself that.

Smoke found the ceiling.

Virgil put on his shoes and moved downward.

The house noticed almost immediately, though not in the way houses in ordinary stories notice. There was no bell at first, no shouting, no running feet. The island resisted through small adjustments of atmosphere. A vent that had been breathing cool air began to exhale warmth. A hallway light blinked once, then steadied too brightly. The fountain in the interior court missed a beat and resumed in the wrong rhythm. Somewhere above, a dog barked and was silenced at once. The white peacocks began making their dry paper cries in the gardens, not alarm exactly, but complaint.

At the laundry level, sprinklers inside the orchid room came on for no reason.

Water struck leaves, glass, tile. A mist moved under the door and drifted across the hallway, so that Virgil walked through cold vapor while smoke gathered above it. Fire and water, each pretending it had arrived independently.

He passed the pantry where fruit was stored in low refrigerated drawers. The door stood open. Inside, melons, pears, figs, and pale grapes sat under white light like offerings to a god who had lost interest in sweetness. On a counter lay a knife and six lemons cut in half. The lemons had been arranged in a circle. He did not know who had done that. In this house, even mistakes looked ritualized if no one corrected them.

The first alarm sounded as he reached the lower service hall.

It was not loud. It was private, almost polite: a repeated tone behind the walls, the island clearing its throat. Red lights began to pulse at the far end of the corridor. The air thickened. Virgil took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it over his mouth. It smelled of the drawer where it had waited.

Then the houseman appeared.

He stood beside the staff elevator, holding a ring of keys and a folded towel. He wore a dark jacket buttoned at the waist, though it was too early for service and too late for sleep. His hair was wet, combed straight back. His face had the smooth impassivity of a man who had spent many years watching people mistake possession for power.

Virgil stopped.

The alarm repeated behind the walls.

Smoke moved over both of them like low weather.

The houseman looked at him, then at the satchel in his hand, then toward the upper floors where the fire had begun to take instructions from itself. There was no surprise in his face. No accusation either. That was worse. He seemed to have been waiting not for Virgil specifically, but for this category of human failure.

Virgil nearly spoke.

The houseman lifted one finger to his own lips.

Not sharply. Not servilely. As a priest might quiet a child in a chapel.

Then he turned and unlocked a narrow door behind him that Virgil had never opened, though he had passed it hundreds of times. The door gave onto a stair of unfinished concrete. At the top of the stairwell, the island had marble and mirrors and painted clouds. Down here, it had pipes sweating in the walls, exposed cables, a smell of bleach, oil, wet plaster, and something animal from the hillside.

The houseman removed one key from the ring and held it out.

Virgil took it.

Their fingers touched.

The houseman’s hand was warm, steady, callused in a way no ordinary servant’s hand should have been in that house. On his third finger was a plain gold ring, turned inward so the band lay against the palm.

Virgil saw it without understanding it.

The houseman stepped aside.

No one thanked anyone. Gratitude would have named too much.

Virgil descended.

The raft

Below the service level, the estate was not an island but a machine pretending to be geology. Pipes larger than tree trunks crossed overhead. Pumps thudded in rooms behind grated doors. Filters churned the pools’ bright water through dark tanks. Electric panels hummed. Coils of hose hung on hooks. Crates of wine, boxes of candles, spare tiles, broken statues, rolled carpets, flood lamps, old theatrical flats, cracked mirrors, and two marble hands from some incomplete figure were stored under tarps. The underworld of beauty was gray, damp, and badly labeled.

The alarm above changed pitch.

Now the house was no longer clearing its throat. It was calling attention to itself.

Virgil moved faster.

He knew the route from memory, but memory was less reliable down here. For years he had come to this level only in thought, planning departures while floating in baths, while Nelly slept beside him, while guests laughed upstairs, while rain that did not fall anywhere else tapped politely from the sprinkler nozzles. The route had grown elaborate in imagination: linen room, service stair, mechanical corridor, garage, old car, lower gate, hill road, city. In imagination, each threshold opened because he had willed it.

In fact, the second door stuck.

He pulled. It held. He pulled harder. Smoke had begun to leak down the stair behind him, impossible already, too fast, as if the house were sending a piece of the upper world after him. He tried the key the houseman had given him. It entered halfway, no farther. He took it out, turned it, cursed softly, tried again. Somewhere above, glass broke. Water began falling through a shaft behind the wall, drumming on metal. The key slid in.

The door opened.

The garage lay beyond, long and low and greenish under fluorescent light.

Most of the cars slept under covers. Their shapes were enormous and useless, ceremonial animals from an extinct household. A red convertible under a film of dust. A white limousine with one flat tire. A station wagon loaded with empty flower crates. A small European car whose windows were fogged from the inside though no one had driven it in years. At the far end, near the service bay, under a gray tarp mottled with mildew, was the car he had built by neglect.

The raft.

A black sedan, long enough to look funereal, low enough to look guilty. Once it had been elegant in the anonymous way powerful men prefer when they want discretion to be mistaken for humility. Now the chrome had gone dull. Leaves were packed below the windshield. One side mirror hung slightly loose. The rear bumper bore a scar from some old escape that had not been taken. Its tires were not new but they held. Its hood was coated in a gray skin of dust, except where Virgil had touched it over the years and left half-moons of hand marks.

He pulled the tarp back.

The fabric came away reluctantly, sighing dust and the smell of damp canvas. Underneath, the windshield flashed once in the fluorescent light, like an animal opening an eye.

Inside, the car had preserved his intention more faithfully than he had. Road maps in the door pocket. A Thomas Guide swollen from moisture. Two flashlights. A paper bag of quarters. Cassette tapes with labels in his handwriting: East, Desert, Georgia, Don’t Play. Bottled water cloudy with age. A wool blanket. A navy overcoat. Sunglasses. A first-aid kit. Cigarettes gone stale in their carton. A paperback atlas with the spine cracked open at the southeastern states. In the glove compartment, cash sealed in an envelope, a photograph he did not look at, and another folded copy of an Atlanta address written on hotel stationery.

He had prepared the raft so long ago that its preparedness accused him.

He opened the driver’s door.

A voice from the far side of the garage said, “I wouldn’t start it yet.”

Virgil froze.

A man stepped out from between the covered limousine and a rack of pool equipment.

He was not large. That was the first insult. After all the years of imagining fate, Virgil had expected height, or theatrical ugliness, or the kind of face a man could remember as a sign. This man had none of that. He was compact, narrow-shouldered, dark-haired, wearing a suit that looked slept in but not careless. He carried a leather folder under one arm and a paper cup of coffee in the other. His shoes were dusty. He had the expression of someone who had been waiting in the wrong place long enough to stop resenting it.

Virgil looked toward the garage entrance, then back at him.

“Who are you?”

The man took a sip of coffee. Grimaced. Kept it anyway.

“Dante.”

Virgil almost laughed. The laugh did not come out.

“No.”

“That’s the name I’m using with you.”

“Using?”

Dante looked past him toward the service stair, where smoke had begun to enter the garage in a thin gray sheet along the ceiling.

“Did you set that?”

Virgil did not answer.

Dante nodded as if receiving confirmation from an uncooperative witness.

“Then we have less time than I was promised.”

“Promised by whom?”

Dante set the coffee on the roof of the black sedan. He opened the leather folder. Inside were papers, tabs, a state seal, a photograph clipped to a form, a note written on yellow paper, and a second key.

Virgil stared at the key.

Dante followed his gaze.

“You’ve got half a plan,” he said. “I’ve got half a warrant. Between us we might make a door.”

The garage lights flickered.

The alarm above them became general.

Now the island shouted.

A bell rang from the service wall. Red strobes pulsed above the garage bay. Somewhere in the distance, shutters began closing automatically over windows, one after another, with soft expensive thuds. Water rushed through pipes overhead. Sprinklers outside burst on and began striking the driveway with wild, crossing streams. The covered cars glowed red, then dark, then red again, like animals breathing in a cave.

Virgil stepped closer to Dante.

“Are you here to arrest me?”

Dante considered this.

“I’m here because a court in Georgia has paperwork, your family has opinions, your wife has waited past reason, and the world has started making arrangements in your absence.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“No. It’s the job.”

Virgil reached for the key in Dante’s hand.

Dante closed his fist.

“Not yet.”

“You said we have less time.”

“We do.”

“Then give me the key.”

“You don’t know where you’re going.”

Virgil looked at the car, at the smoke, at the folder, at this small dry man who had somehow entered the island through its root system.

“Atlanta.”

Dante smiled without pleasure.

“That’s what the paper says. Papers are optimistic.”

Another sound came from above.

Not alarm. Not breaking glass. Something softer.

A door closing.

Both men looked toward the stair.

For a moment, through the smoke, Virgil thought Nelly herself would appear there barefoot in the white robe, not running, never running, simply arriving with the terrible calm of a goddess whose property had become confused. Instead no one came. But the temperature in the garage changed. The air seemed to take on the fragrance of orange oil and wet hair. The island remembered its ruler.

Dante noticed.

“So that’s real,” he said.

Virgil turned on him.

“What?”

Dante shook his head.

“Nothing useful.”

The houseman appeared at the top of the concrete stair.

Smoke moved around him. The red alarm light struck his face and passed off it. He did not descend. He looked at Dante, then at Virgil, then at the black sedan with its open door. In one hand he held the folded towel. In the other, the ring of keys. The plain gold band on his finger flashed once, then disappeared as he closed his hand.

Behind him, far above and somewhere impossible, Nelly called Virgil’s name.

Not loudly.

That was the worst of it.

She called it as if from the bed. As if he had only walked into the wrong room. As if the whole burning, ringing, flooding island were merely an extension of her waiting.

Virgil put one hand on the roof of the car.

The metal was cold.

Dante opened the driver’s door wider.

“Now,” he said.

Virgil got in.

The property line

It was a humiliation of knees, satchel, old leather, and breath. The steering wheel was tacky under his palms. The seat smelled of mildew and sun-rot. He adjusted it and found that the lever no longer worked. Dante slid into the passenger seat with the folder on his lap and handed over the second key. The keys knocked together in Virgil’s hand, houseman’s key and Dante’s key, island key and outside key, both absurdly necessary.

The engine did not start.

Of course it did not.

The first turn produced a dry click.

The second a grinding cough.

Above the garage, the fire reached something richer. The smell changed from paper and eucalyptus to varnish, fabric, old wood, the inner sweetness of expensive things becoming equal.

Virgil tried again.

The engine turned, caught, failed.

Dante looked at him.

“Did you ever drive it?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

Virgil could not remember.

Dante leaned forward and struck the dashboard with the heel of his hand.

“Again.”

Virgil turned the key.

This time the engine caught with a sound like a man dragged upright from a sickbed. It shook the whole car. The hood trembled. Something under them rattled with comic violence. A brown cloud came from the exhaust and filled the rear of the garage. Dante rolled down his window. It went halfway and stopped.

“Good enough,” he said.

The garage bay door began to rise before Virgil touched anything.

The houseman stood beside the control panel.

He had come down without their seeing.

He held the button with two fingers. The great door lifted slowly, revealing the service drive beyond in horizontal strips: wet concrete first, then thrashing sprinkler water, then black hedge, then the lower gate strobing red in the alarm light, then the city below erased by fog.

The door stopped halfway.

Dante looked at the houseman.

The houseman looked back.

For one suspended second the whole island balanced between permission and refusal.

Then the houseman pressed the button again. The door rose the rest of the way.

Virgil drove.

The car lurched forward too hard. Dante braced one hand against the dashboard. The tires rolled over a coil of hose, dragged it, released it. The sedan emerged from the garage into water.

Not rain. Not yet. Irrigation, suppression, fountain overflow, a private weather system in revolt. Sprinklers hammered the windshield from both sides. The wipers shrieked across glass dry in some places, drowning in others. Smoke from the upper house came down the slope in torn banners. The terrace lights flashed behind it, white, red, white again, as if the estate had become a ship signaling distress to no ocean.

Virgil steered toward the service gate.

It was not fully open.

The left side had moved. The right side remained stubbornly fixed, black iron caught in its track. Beyond it the road dropped along the hillside toward the basin. The gap was possible. Not generous. Not dignified. Possible.

Dante leaned forward.

“Don’t stop.”

“I can see that.”

“Seeing and doing are cousins. Not brothers.”

Virgil pressed the accelerator.

The car slid.

For a moment it did not move toward the gate but sideways, rear end drifting on water-slick concrete, tires searching for ground beneath the estate’s manufactured storm. The front bumper kissed the iron, scraped, withdrew, found the gap again. Virgil corrected too hard. The side mirror struck the gate and vanished with a bright crack. Dante ducked though there was no need.

The sedan forced itself through.

Metal screamed along metal.

The sound seemed to tear something more than paint. Behind them, one of the white peacocks flew low across the service road, absurd and panicked, its tail dragging through sprinkler spray. It struck the hedge, regained itself, vanished into smoke.

Then they were beyond the gate.

The hill road descended in wet switchbacks.

Above them the house burned modestly, selectively, as if even ruin there had been instructed to remain tasteful. Fire showed in one upper window. Smoke poured from a side corridor. Sprinklers flashed silver in the red alarm light. Staff moved like pale figures in an aquarium. On the highest terrace, where the false columns stood against the whitening sky, a shape appeared and did not move.

Nelly.

Virgil did not look directly.

He saw her in the rearview mirror, or thought he did: white robe, dark hair, bare feet, all the house’s wounded beauty gathered into a single still figure. She did not wave. She did not call now. She watched the car descend from her island.

The mirror trembled with the engine.

Then fog took her.

Dante reached over and turned the mirror slightly away.

Virgil almost objected.

He did not.

The road twisted down through hedges, retaining walls, black palms, the service turn where trash bins had overturned in the wind. A garbage lid rolled across the road in front of them, struck the bumper, and spun into the drainage ditch like a shield from some ridiculous battlefield. Water ran everywhere. The sprinklers had overfilled the gutters. Mud came down from the planted slopes in dark ropes. Leaves slapped the windshield. A branch cracked against the roof and stayed there, dragged above them for thirty yards before tearing loose.

At the lower gate, the keypad sparked.

The gate opened six inches and stopped.

Dante swore softly.

Virgil braked. The car shuddered.

Behind them, from high on the hill, came a deeper sound: not explosion, not exactly, but the inward collapse of something large and decorative. Perhaps a pergola. Perhaps the false colonnade. Perhaps only a section of ceiling over a room no one used. The island had begun sacrificing its own ornaments.

Dante got out.

Wind pushed into the car at once, raw and wet and full of smoke. Not the curated air of the terraces, not orange oil, not lilies, not the temperature-controlled breath of the bedchamber. This air smelled of wet asphalt, hot wires, eucalyptus, gasoline, city dust, and the old ocean hidden under Los Angeles.

Virgil watched Dante go to the gate box. He opened the metal panel with a screwdriver from his pocket. The gesture was so ordinary it seemed magical. He pulled one wire, touched another. Sparks jumped. The gate stuttered, closed two inches, opened one, stopped.

From above, a siren approached.

Then another.

Dante looked back.

Virgil opened his door, but Dante snapped a hand up: stay.

The order landed in Virgil with startling force. He stayed.

For ten years he had obeyed almost nothing but appetite, delay, and Nelly’s weather. Now a small man at a broken gate lifted one hand and Virgil remained in the driver’s seat like a child in a school crossing.

Dante struck the gate box once with the screwdriver handle.

The gate began to open.

Not smoothly. In little resentful increments. A foot. Two feet. Enough.

Dante ran back, got in, and pulled the door shut.

“Go.”

Virgil went.

The car crossed the property line.

The island ended.

Los Angeles did not begin.

At least not as a city.

It rose around them as wasteland: not empty, not dead, but overmade and abandoned by meaning. Dawn exposed the basin in layers of concrete, fog, flood-channel, billboard, parking lot, palm trunk, motel sign, stucco wall, chain-link fence, and dark glass. The streets below the hill were slick with sprinkler runoff and the first real rain, which had begun without anyone noticing. It came down lightly, almost experimentally, beading on the cracked windshield, blackening the asphalt, releasing from the dust a smell like old pennies and bruised weeds.

The city had been waiting under paradise.

Now it opened.

Freeways moved in the distance like rivers of tin. Helicopters passed low enough to make the car roof tremble. A billboard for a woman’s perfume had peeled at one corner, so that her enormous printed face seemed to be slipping from its own beauty. In a flood-control channel, a shopping cart lay on its side like the skeleton of a small animal. Neon signs still burned in windows though morning had come. At a bus stop, three men in work clothes watched the black sedan pass with complete indifference, which wounded Virgil more than pursuit.

The car coughed at the first red light.

Dante placed one hand on the dashboard, as if calming a horse.

“No,” he said to it.

The engine held.

Virgil looked in the rearview mirror despite himself.

The hill had disappeared into smoke and marine fog. The island was no longer visible. Only a pale smear above the basin, lit from within by alarm and morning.

He expected relief.

What came instead was exposure.

On the island, every element had been arranged around him: water to hold him, light to flatter him, Nelly to preserve and accuse him, staff to remove evidence, walls to keep away weather. Here the world had no opinion of his comfort. Trucks roared in the next lane. Rain tapped the roof. A siren crossed somewhere ahead, then vanished. The car smelled of old upholstery and its own labor. The fax paper pressed against his ribs. His hands shook on the wheel.

Dante opened the leather folder on his lap.

“Airport?” Virgil asked.

Dante looked at the papers, then at the road, then at Virgil.

“Eventually.”

“I need to get to Atlanta.”

“You need to get through Los Angeles first.”

Virgil almost laughed again. This time a little of it came out, dry and wrong.

Behind them, somewhere beyond visibility, Nelly’s island continued to burn in carefully chosen rooms.

Ahead, the city spread itself in gray corridors, wet and indifferent, a sea without water, a storm without grandeur, a place where every route looked possible until entered.

Dante folded the first paper back.

“Left,” he said.

Virgil turned left.

The car complained, corrected, and followed the road down into the wasteland.