That’s all it was. Just splatters of paint. Only with your head all messed up the way it was, you thought you were seeing— That was bullshit.
He knew what he had seen then, and what he was seeing now. “Camouflage,” he whispered. “It was all right here. Everything was. And … it still is.” Now that his head was clearing, he could again feel the steady, harmonic power that this place held. The choir was still here, its voice just as musical, although now dim and distant. He looked at a pile of bricks and old broken chunks of plaster and saw a barely discernible face hiding within it. It was the face of a woman with a scar on her forehead. “Allie?” Jake murmured. “Isn’t your name Allie?” There was no answer. The face was gone. He was only looking at an unlovely pile of bricks and plaster again.
He looked back at the rose. It was, he saw, not the dark red that lives at the heart of a blazing furnace, but a dusty, mottled pink. It was very beautiful, but not perfect. Some of the petals had curled back; the outer edges of these were brown and dead. It wasn’t the sort of cultivated flower he had seen in florists’ shops; he supposed it was a wild rose. “You’re very beautiful,” he said, and once more stretched his hand out to touch it.
Although there was no breeze, the rose nodded toward him. For just a moment the pads of his fingers touched its surface, smooth and velvety and marvellously alive, and all around him the voice of the choir seemed to swell. “Are you sick, rose?”
There was no answer, of course. When his fingers left the faded pink bowl of the flower, it nodded back to its original position, growing out of the paint-splattered weeds in its quiet, forgotten splendor. Do roses bloom at this time of year? Jake wondered. Wild ones? Why would a wild rose grow in a vacant lot, anyway? And if there’s one, how come there aren’t more?
He remained on his hands and knees a little longer, then realized he could stay here looking at the rose for the rest of the afternoon (or maybe the rest of his life) and not come any closer to solving its mystery. He had seen it plain for a moment, as he had seen everything else in this forgotten, trash-littered corner of the city; he had seen it with its mask off and its camouflage tossed aside. He wanted to see that again, but wanting would not make it so. It was time to go home.
He saw the two books he’d bought at The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind lying nearby. As he picked them up, a bright silver object slipped from the pages of Charlie the Choo-Choo and fell into a scruffy patch of weeds. Jake bent, favoring his hurt ankle, and picked it up. As he did so, the choir seemed to sigh and swell, then fell back to its almost inaudible hum. “So that part was real, too,” he murmured. He ran the ball of his thumb over the blunt protruding points of the key and into those primi-tive V-shaped notches. He sent it skating over the mild s-curves at the end of the third notch. Then he tucked it deep into the right front pocket of his pants and began to limp back toward the fence.
He had reached it and was preparing to scramble over the top when a terrible thought suddenly seized his mind.
The rose! What if somebody comes in here and picks it? A little moan of horror escaped him. He turned back and after a moment his eyes picked it out, although it was deep in the shadow of a neighboring building now—a tiny pink shape in the dimness, vulnerable, beautiful, and alone. I can’t leave it—I have to guard it!
But a voice spoke up in his mind, a voice that was surely that of the man he had met at the way station in that strange other life. No one will pick it. Nor will any vandal crush it beneath his heel because his dull eyes cannot abide the sight of its beauty. That is not the danger. It can protect itself from such things as those.
A sense of deep relief swept through Jake. Can I come here again and look at it? he asked the phantom voice. When I’m low, or if the voices come hack and start their argument again? Can I come back and look at it and have some peace? The voice did not answer, and after a few moments of listening, Jake decided it was gone. He tucked Charlie the Choo-Choo and Riddle-De-Dum! into the waistband of his pants—which, he saw, were streaked with dirt and dotted with clinging burdocks—and then grabbed the board fence. He boosted himself up, swung over the top, and dropped onto the sidewalk of Second Avenue again, being careful to land on his good foot.