The sun was setting, the fog beginning to roll down from the hills. The sky to the east and above was perfectly clear, dim, and almost golden. To the west, the fog bank descended, gray, moist, and white. Amina Belkacem, a most wonderful woman, who deserved to be loved, resolved to go back to France. California was in many respects a beautiful dream, but in France the beauty was awake and alert. France was her home, and there was a great deal to be said for going home.
With the sunset came the sound of a mourning dove somewhere in the trees. As in Algeria and as in France, it had waited for the tranquility that comes in heat or fading light. Its call was not a lament. Neither of happiness nor sadness, it rested perfectly upon the edge where these met, as if upon the ridge of a roof, superior to either, overlooking both, with the clearest sight and highest, most open view, which is that of acceptance. The cry of the mourning dove is beautiful because it wants nothing.
A Thousand Lawyers
HAD JULES BEEN jerked around in France from one end of the country to another, he might have been resigned. A powerless semi-academic, he had been defeated even in infancy. Though in his youth he had had episodes of energy and luck, such flares had faded with age. In Paris, he might have simply bowed his head and let them work their ways with him.
But this was the New World. Floating on the jet stream, his plane roared toward the night in fearless confidence. The sun set across the plains, casting a deepening shadow until east of the Mississippi the land below was scattered with the sparkling of cities great and small. To the north, perhaps all the way into Canada, a continental storm front flashed with lightning as constant and surprising as raindrops bouncing on a lake.
The immense turbines spinning within the aircraft’s engines didn’t miss a beat. Like the heart, they had to be constant and reliable until the end. He could hardly explain whence his sudden energy and optimism came, but on the red-eye into New York he neither slept nor read. He felt that something from the vast substance of the ground over which he flew was penetrating him insubstantially. If a hundred invisible particles with strange names, and radio waves, cosmic rays, and magnetic fields were at any moment and without detection bathing him, everyone in the cabin, and indeed the whole world, with their unknown, mischievous, and mystical transits, who was to say that the land, air, and light over or through which he shot could not give strength where there was no strength, luck when luck had vanished, defiance in the face of defeat, and life where life had been running out?
He couldn’t have slept even had he wanted to. Running through him like an electric current was the empowering conviction that he himself did not need to live. It was Luc who needed to live. Without fear, Jules could take any chance. Understanding and accepting that he was expendable gave him strength as steady as the power that propelled the jet over one diamond-lit city after another glittering in a sea of black.
NOTHING FROM THE night flight vanished or dissipated. By the time he went to his tower room at the Four Seasons New York, he needed sleep but was neither exhausted nor demoralized. The image of Luc appeared, as often before, but now more lively and happier. He didn’t think anymore of Luc dying but only of Luc living.
Luc didn’t understand leukemia, but he understood crocodiles and was hysterically afraid of them. Once, when putting him to bed, Jules saw that the child would be kept up in fear, so he said, “Look, crocodiles live in Africa, which is far away from here, and they don’t even know that this is where you live. If they knew, they wouldn’t know how to get here. And if they did know how to get here they wouldn’t be able to cross the jungle and the desert to get to the sea. And if they could cross the jungle and the desert, they couldn’t swim the Mediterranean. But if they could swim it, they couldn’t walk from Marseilles all the way to Paris. If they could walk to Paris, they wouldn’t know how to take the RER to Cergy. And if they did know, they wouldn’t have the money to buy a ticket, or know where to get off, because they can’t read and speak French. And even if they had the money and could read and speak French, once they got off in Cergy they wouldn’t know where you live. Even if they did, they couldn’t get in the front door. Even if they broke down the front door, they wouldn’t know where your room is. If they knew where your room is, they couldn’t get in the door. And even if they did, I would shoot them.”
Needless to say, this did not have the desired effect, as attested by Luc’s open mouth, widened eyes, and the fact that he hardly dared breathe. “Wait wait wait,” Jules said upon seeing this. “Forget what I just said. That was pretend. This is what it is really,” and he then went through the sequence in reverse, banishing the crocodiles back to the Blue Nile, and watching Luc relax as they grew farther and farther distant, comforted enough so that before the crocodiles had even finished struggling across the Sahara he was fast asleep.
Jules hoped that if parents and grandparents truly loved and tried their best, the children would forgive the mistakes even when those who had made them were long gone.
ACORN MIGHT HAVE hundreds of thousands of employees set in the tectonic foundation of several trillions of dollars. And in comparison to Jules, Jack Cheatham and Rich Panda might well be like advanced space aliens with brains and social senses so much more capable than his that in the arena of their type of calculation and maneuver he would be as ill-equipped as a crocodile on the Champs-élysées. But if he didn’t fear and didn’t retreat, if he simply stood his ground and dared, he might cut through the webs made by people who spent their lives spinning them.