“That’s a lot of money, even for you,” she says, keeping her voice neutral as his words ring in her ears, and this, at last, could be an end to fear and struggling, and she tries to imagine what he could want for it. She could appear at his cocktail parties and perform prodigious feats of memory for his guests, or she could follow him home and slide into his bed, or she could wear a corporate badge on a lanyard and sit through boring meetings drinking muddy coffee and it would still be worth it, unless it won’t, for as quickly as it formed her abjection has dissolved, and she wonders if she’ll have to destroy him for humiliating her. Have to see how that goes. She watches him, waits, remembers to breathe.
“My net worth is higher than the press imagines,” he says, and now the benign mask is gone and he’s perfectly cold, a chess player driving through the steps of an intricate combination. “In any case. My security service prepared a précis of the circumstances of your life, as they do for everyone allowed within fifty feet of me. You have a rented apartment in Boston, and you recently allowed your lease to expire on another in Santa Monica, though both are all but unfurnished, and chosen in large part for their proximity to the airports. In the past year you’ve spent about sixteen nights in both combined. So on top of the Mayo I’ll throw in a home. There’s a house I own in Noe Valley where I sometimes put visiting dignitaries—it’s quite beautiful, very private and very secure, built around a central garden, rather like the Gardner Museum in Boston. I think the architect won a prize. I’ll sign it over to you, and take care of the taxes. It’s not far from your friend Philip, who would consider himself my rival.”
A silence, and finally she says, “And in exchange?”
“First,” he says, “no questions.”
He sits up very straight and drains his glass and it occurs to her that whatever he wants he wants it entirely, that this moment is the crisis of his life, and then he says, “I want your memories.”
As her rage rises like a black wave she’s aware that there’s something she’s been missing and looking into his eyes while he waits for her answer she sees his terror.
She kills the power to the building.
30
Ossuary
The town car’s headlights illuminate the stones and the streamers of fog as it jolts over the steep pitted dirt road. Once again Thales dials his mother’s cell from his own but, like all the family’s secured electronics, his phone is mired in firewalls that make even the basic things nearly impossible, and once again his cell’s screen flashes CONNECTION UNAVAILABLE, but now the road crests and levels out and there in the headlights is the house.
He sits in the car, watching steam billow from the square pool of black water and dissolve in the wind. Smoking mirror, he thinks, form erupting out of nothing, driven by the temperature differential between the hot water and the cold night air. The pool, fed by a hot spring, is cut from the coarse granite of the mountain, the grey of the concrete of the low house behind it.
She’d designed the house before he was born, when she was barely older than he is now. In the library of their house back in Rio there’s a photograph of her at the building site, sitting on the boulder that’s still there by the pool. She was very thin then, and entirely serious, staring past the camera as though unaware of its existence. She’d never been to architecture school, had just traveled the world when she was young and had no money, drawing and redrawing the great buildings, trying to render their essences with maximum economy of line. She’d spent three nights in a copse of trees at the base of the Acropolis, and later had shared the basement of a squat in the 16th arrondissement with runaways and junkies. He’d found an old interview on a long-defunct blog where she’d said she viewed the mountain house as an exercise in pure form, and as a sort of ossuary, the only place she’d want to leave her bones.
Turning off the car’s lights, he sees light in the house’s windows.
He gets out of the car. It’s cold there, and smells of rock, dust, fog. Sharp fragments of glass scattered on the rocks—his brothers sometimes come here with girls and bottles of wine. They deride the house, even as they used its isolation, saying it’s eerie, like all their mother’s aesthetic fancies, just stark water, stone and wind, a lot of nothing in the middle of nowhere, not seeing, as he does, how the house, with its rough planes of crumbling grey stone and its trickles of black water, is like geology abstracted from erosion.
His phone finds the house network; he gestures over its screen to unlock the doors.
The front door swings open under his hand. Inside, it’s really just one room, not very big, and feels less like a house than a temple, or a library, or maybe a tomb—his mother, in the interview, had said her influences included the library of Alexandria, Taliesin West, Ryōan-ji and Louis Kahn. No one there, and no sign of his mom. He sees that the cushions have been pulled from the couches set in the walls to make a sort of nest on the floor, probably his brothers’ doing, and he worries he’ll step on a stray condom. The back door is ajar, probably through their carelessness. He wonders how long the lights have been on.
Standing in the doorway, he hears rock clatter in the dark behind him. For a moment he stands there, perfectly still, willing it to have been the wind, and he could retreat to the car and the protection of its armament but it’s twenty feet away and feels unattainable. It’s still somehow unbelievable that some stranger would really try to hurt him, even after what happened, and he wonders if this is often what people think right before they die; how fitting, though, to leave his bones by the square black pool. He waits, listening, decides it was nothing, but when he finally he goes inside he locks the front and back doors.
His mother’s computer is on the desk before the one large window. It dates back to the decade before he was born, but she’s particular about her vintage hardware, insisting that she can only work with what she knows. It’s a museum piece, but functional, and it occurs to him that it’s probably too old to support the protocols that hamstring every other secure family device, so maybe for once he can make a fucking phone call.
The computer wakes at his touch. Its interface is quaint, but intuitive enough, and it’s easy to find the program for making calls because it’s the last one that was used. It won’t work, he thinks, keying in his mother’s number, but then it starts to ring.
The ringing goes on and on, and he’s about to hang up when his mother, half asleep, picks up and says, “Hello?”
“I’m glad I found you,” he says.
“Helio?” she says groggily. “Is that you?”
“No, Mother,” he says, unable to control his irritation. “It’s me. Good lord.”
“Marco Aurelio?” she says.
“Yes, exactly. This is Marco Aurelio. I dropped fifty IQ points, changed my name and started smoking reefer. I’m calling from the mountain house.”
“Who is this?”
“Who do you think? I’ve been looking for you. It’s probably nothing but I thought I heard someone outside.”
“Thales? Baby? I’ve missed you so much,” she says, and it’s just like her to get so emotional over nothing and most likely she is drunk.
“That’s fine, Mom, but something isn’t right.”
“Where are you?”
“The mountain house, like I told you.”