He’s been wanting to know this since we arrived, but he waited (wisely) until I was drunk enough to talk about it without screaming. Though I’m not drunk enough that I don’t realize that’s what he’s aiming for.
I don’t answer right away, but stare out of the window. This second safe house is near the Panhandle, on Fell Street. It looks right onto the thin strip of park connected to the Golden Gate Dome. I can just barely see the tips of Grace Cathedral from between two orchard high-rises. It’s quite a pretty view—those pure white towers flanked by fruit trees within glass buildings thirty stories high.
I get to my feet and wobble.
Nazarin leans back in his chair. “You’re drunk.”
“Very deductive, detective.”
“Come on. Tell me what happened to you in there.”
I stagger to the little bathroom. “I’ll tell you in a second.”
I pee and then lean over the tiny sink. I press my palms against my eyes, breathing raggedly. It’s late and I feel like shit. I’ve drunk at least a quarter of the bottle of the fake gin. I’m definitely drunk.
When I come back, Nazarin has a huge glass of water and I gulp it down. I’ve delayed as long as I can. Time to return to the nightmare world, at least for a little while.
So I tell him everything. I don’t leave anything out, and I’ve got a pretty good memory. I tell him about the mandrake demons, false Mana-ma and Tila, Mia’s scalpel. “The drug seemed to pull her in deeper. My sister was there and she started ranting. I guess Mia made that happen? Maybe it’s a hint, but mainly she just sounded batshit crazy.”
“What’d she say?”
“Something about finding the link and then: ‘He is the red one, the fair one, the handsome one. From Earth and now he goes back to the Earth. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Changing faces like kaleidoscopes.’”
“Sounds like the garbled scripture that Tila spouted in Zenith, according to Sal.”
“That’s what’s weird. If Mia was going to give me a hint, shouldn’t she have referenced Mana-ma’s Good Book? That’s what we all have memorized. Mana-ma would show us other holy writ, all sorts of it too: the Torah, the Qur’an, the Book of Mormon, gnostic texts, the works—but out-of-context bits that suited her. Usually she ranted about how they were the warped echoes of the true voice of God, which only she heard. Naturally.”
That familiar guilt twists deep in my stomach. For a long time, I’d believed that Mana-ma did hear the true voice of God. That she was the vessel able to bring us salvation. And I’d been so stubborn, so willingly blind, for so long. After Tila and I had left the Hearth, after the last holds of Mana-ma were finally gone from me, we went through a phase of reading all the holy books we could get our hands on. Buddhist texts, ancient Egyptian things (I admit to reading the Book of the Heavenly Cow mainly because it had such a great title), Ellen White’s Seventh-Day Adventist texts. A lot of stuff from other cults, especially ones formed after Mana’s Hearth. The Contours of God. The Green Cabal, which thought that people who saw aliens were actually seeing fairies, and lived in the woods with toadstools for a few decades.
Everything and anything, wondering if maybe we’d find the truth in one of them.
We didn’t, but I remember sitting side by side in our little San Francisco apartment in the Inner Sunset, our legs touching and our cheeks pressed against each other as we read, like when we had been connected. I still feel I think best when I’m sitting like that with Tila, feeling the steady beating of her heart in time with mine, and the gentle sound of her breathing. Maybe that’s why I’ve felt so lost: I can’t think properly when she’s gone. All the good memories with her hurt.
The silence has gone on too long. I can tell he’s been watching me as I stare blankly into space.
“So. Let’s start looking at what Mia might have meant. It sounds like religious rhetoric, so I’m thinking the Bible,” Nazarin says. He blinks and his ocular implant activates the wallscreen, bringing up a version of the King James Bible.
Nazarin taps his thumb against his lips. “Vuk’s dead. It could be about him. So I guess that explains the ashes to ashes part. ‘For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’”
“Ashes to ashes, funk to funky … we know that Mia’s a junkie!” I sing. The SynthGin has made me silly.
At Nazarin’s confused look, I giggle even more. “Never mind. Old song by a man called David Bowie. Sorry.” It was from post-1969, so I first listened to it after coming to San Francisco, during my and my sister’s self-taught education in music. I clear my throat, try to calm myself. “I have no idea what she meant by ‘the red one, the fair one, the handsome one.’”
He searches for quotes relating to red. The following appears on the wall:
Isaiah 1:18: Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.