XII

i

He walked home. It took him almost five hours, his trek fueled by Hershey bars and doughnuts, washed down with a carton of milk, all consumed as he walked. Either he was steadily becoming more used to the sights his eyes were showing him or else his brain (perhaps for his own protection) had got the trick of dialing down the amount of information he was assimilating.

Whatever the reason, he didn’t feel the need to linger with the same obsessiveness, but wandered on his way taking mental snapshots of sights that drew his attention, then pressing on.

The conversation with Bethlynn had been more enlightening than he’d expected to be and, as he walked, taking his snapshots, he turned fragments of it over in his head. Whether or not there was indeed a God-part of Patrick, a part that would never sicken or die, she was plainly quite sincere in that belief, and if the possibility comforted Patrick (while putting food in the cat’s bowl) then there was no harm in it. Her assessment of Will, however, was another deal completely. She’d made, it seemed, an instinctual judgment about him, based in part on what she’d heard from Patrick, in part on articles that she’d seen, and in part on the work. He was a man with a dark heart, she’d decided, who wanted to taint others with that darkness. So far, so simple. Whether she was right or wrong, there was nothing there that an intelligent individual with a little imagination might not have construed. But there was more to her theory; more, he suspected, than she’d been willing to share with him. He was an unwitting shaman, that, at least, she’d been ready to tell him. Working change, inducing visions. And why? Because somebody in his past (somebody she didn’t even want him to name) had planted a seed.

That could only be Jacob Steep. Whatever else Jacob had done, good and bad, he’d been the first person in Will’s life to give him, if only for a few hours, a sense that he was special. Not a poor second best to a dead brother, the lumped clod to Nathaniel’s perfected angel, but a chosen child. How many times in the three decades since that night on the hilltop had he revisited the winter wood, the weapon buzzing in his hand as he strode toward his victims? And seen their blood flow? And heard Jacob, at his back, whispering to him: Suppose they were the last. The very last.

What had his life to date been but an extended footnote to that encounter: an attempt to make some idiot recompense for the little murders he’d committed at Steep’s behest, or rather for the unalloyed joy he’d taken in the thought of shaping the world that way?

If there was some buried desire in him to be more than a witness to extinctions—to be, as Bethlynn had said, a worker of change—then it was because Steep had planted that desire.

Whether he had done it intentionally or not was another question entirely. Was it possible that the whole initiation had been stage-managed to make him into some semblance of the man he’d become? Or had Jacob been about the work of making a child into a murderer and simply been interrupted in the process, leaving the smeared, unfinished thing Will was to stumble off and puzzle out its purpose for itself? Most likely he would never know. And in that he shared a common history with most of the men who wandered Folsom and Polk and Market this late afternoon. Men whose mothers and fathers—however loving, however liberal—would never understand them the way they understood their straight children, because these gay sons were genetic cul-de-sacs. Men who would be obliged to make their own families: out of friends, out of lovers, out of divas. Men who were self-invented, for better or worse, makers of styles and mythologies that they constantly cast off with the impatience of souls who would never find a description that quite fitted. If there was a sadness in this there was also a kind of unholy glee.

He almost wished Steep were here, so he could show him the sights. Take him into the Gestalt and buy him a beer.

ii

By the time he got home it was almost six o’clock. There were three messages on the answering machine from Drew, one from Adrianna, and one from Patrick, reporting that he’d just had what he characterized as an intriguing conversation with Bethlynn.

“I couldn’t figure out whether she liked you or not, but you certainly made an impression. And she was very insistent about there not being any kind of rift between her and me. So, good job, buddy. I know how hard that was for you to do. But thanks. It means a lot to me.”

Having listened to the messages, he went to sluice off the sweat of his journey and, roughly toweling himself dry, wandered into the bedroom and lay down. Despite his fatigue, he had a sense of simple physical well-being he couldn’t remember having had for a long time: months, perhaps years, before the events in Balthazar. There was a gentle tremor in his muscles, and in his head an almost reverent calm.

So calm, in fact, that a perverse notion came trotting in to disturb it.

“Where are you, fox?” he said, very quietly.

The empty house made its cooling and settling sounds, as houses do, but there was nothing amid the ticks and creaks that might have indicated Lord Fox’s presence. No tapping of his claws on the boards, no swish of his tail against the wall.

“I know you’re there somewhere.”

This wasn’t a lie. He believed it. The fox had walked the line between dreams and the waking world on two occasions; now Will was ready to join him in that place and see what the view was like. But first the animal had to show itself.

“Stop being coy,” Will said. “We’re in this together.” He sat up. “I want to be with you,” he said. “That sounds sexual, doesn’t it? Maybe that’s what it is.” He closed his eyes and tried to conjure the animal behind his lids. Its gleaming fur and glittering teeth, its sway and swagger. It was his animal, wasn’t it?

First his tormentor, then his truth teller—the eater of dick-flesh and the dropper of bon mots. “Where the fuck are you?” he wanted to know. Still it didn’t come.

Well, he thought, isn’t this a perfect little paradox? After rejecting the fox’s wisdom for so long, he’d finally come round to understanding its place in his life, and the damn creature wasn’t playing.

He got up off the bed and was about to try his luck in another room when the telephone rang. It was Drew. “What happened to you?” he wanted to know. “I’ve been calling and calling.”

“I went over to Berkeley to kowtow to Bethlynn. Then I walked back, which was wonderful, and now I’m talking to you, which is even more wonderful.”

“You are up, buddy. Have you been poppin’ some pills?”

“Nope. I’m just feeling good.”

“Are you in the mood for some fun tonight?”

“Like what?”

“Like I come over, and we lock the doors and make some serious love?”

“I’d like that.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Chocolate and doughnuts.”

“That’s why you’re flying. You’re on a sugar rush. I’ll bring some food with me. We’ll have a love feast.”

“That sounds decadent.”

“It will be. I guarantee. I’ll be over in an hour.”

“By which you mean two.”

“You know me so well,” Drew said.

“Oh no. I’ve got lots to learn,” Will breathed.

“Like what?”

“Like what kind of face you pull when I’m fucking the bejeezus out of you.”

Adrianna returned his call as he was making himself the ritual martini. He asked her how the job interview had gone. Like shit, she told him the instant she’d walked into the planning offices she’d known that after a week working there she’d be stir-crazy.

“When we were out in the mud somewhere being bitten to death by bugs,” she said, “I used to wish I had a nice clean job in a nice clean office with a view of the Bay Bridge. But I realized today: I can’t do it. Simple as that. I’ll end up doing somebody serious harm with a typewriter. So I don’t know. I’ll find something that suits me eventually, but you’re quite a hard act to follow, Will.

What’s that clinking sound?”

“I’m making a martini.”

“That brings back memories,” she sighed. Then,

“Remember what you said in Balthazar, about how you felt everything was running down? Now I know how you feel.”

“It’ll pass,” he said. “You’ll find something else.”

“Oh, so the ennui’s yesterday’s news, is it? What changed your mind? Drew?”

“Not exactly—”

“He makes a cute drunk, by the way, which I always think’s a good sign. Oh shit, I’m late for dinner.” She hollered to Glenn that she was on her way, then whispered, “We’re dining with the other members of his string quartet. I swear, if they break into four-part harmony over the soup, I’m leaving him. See you later, hon.”

The conversation over, he carried his drink through to the file room and finally tidied up the photographs he’d cast on the floor, a job he’d been putting off since Lord Fox had ignited their phantom life. It was a simple, almost domestic task, and yet like so much else that he’d seen and done today, it felt charged, as though filled with hidden significance. Not so hidden, perhaps.

His initiation into the mysteries of his new existence had begun here, with these pictures. They had been, as it were, a map of the territory he was to explore. Now the map could be put away. The journey had begun.

With all the pictures stowed, he went back upstairs to shave, and there in the mirror had confirmation that what he’d sensed in the room below was true. The face he saw was not one that he remembered ever seeing before. The physiognomy was his, surely enough—the bones, the scars, the crease—but the way he looked at himself (and thus the way he looked back) was in some subtle fashion different and, in the matter of a man’s gaze, a subtlety is everything. Here was the rarest creature in his universe; the great beast that had been, until now, too far from him to be seen: behind the next copse, over the next hill. In truth, it had perhaps been easier to find than he’d pretended, but fear had kept him from looking too hard. Now he wondered why. There was nothing so terrible here, nothing unfathomable.

Just the child becomes a man, just the hair going to gray, and the skin a little leathery from too much noonday sun.

He thought of the fox, extolling the virtues of heterosexuality, of his children making children making children. Will would not have the comfort of their progression. There would be no off-spring to carry this face into futurity. He was in a race of one.

Suppose this were the last.

Well, it was. And there was something pungent and powerful about that thought, the thought of living and dying and passing away in the heat of his own fine fire.

“So be it,” he said, and set to shaving.