Jacob, p.14
Jacob, page 14
Something was troubling me. I hold up a hand to interrupt. “Wait a minute. You said that seven years is the most you should stay in one place. But … you lived with Monsieur for what? Five years? He had to have been there for a few years before you met him, so there’s at least seven right there. And then he stayed in his house for another seven while you were in Boston—”
Jacob nods. “Yes. I didn’t know then what I know now. Monsieur had stayed much too long in the Seattle house. I didn’t realize until much later, but he did that mostly for me. It was a dangerous thing to do. He had fallen for me, you know—that was even more dangerous for him, a man in this kind of existence.
“There’s more—” Jacob hesitates. “The lawyer, Durant, he was very meticulous. He had kept exhaustive records. He showed me that he had filled two file cabinets and had been working on a third when the fire took Monsieur from me.
“Later on, after I had satisfied myself that Monsieur’s coffin had not survived the fire, I became obsessed with those files. I wanted to find out everything about him that I could—as if somehow that would restore the comfort of his spirit to me and bring me closer to the man he was.
“I asked Durant if I could examine those files. Of course, he made them available to me. Those cabinets revealed the depth of Monsieur’s existence. They opened up adventures of discovery and revelation. At one time, Monsieur had owned properties in nine different cities, Portland, San Francisco, Sacramento, Denver, St. Louis, Atlanta, Charlotte, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. He’d sold three of them before he took me from the street. The more I traced his history, as detailed in those files, the more I realized he had been repositioning his assets continually, the way one might arrange and rearrange chess pieces on a board to examine various defensive positions.
“But then, I noticed, there was a moment when the pattern of his moves had shifted. No longer reorganizing for convenience, he had begun aggressively liquidating his Seattle assets—beginning almost immediately the day I left for Boston. That startled me, but I pressed on. Monsieur had sold all but two of the remaining houses—most of them for cash. He’d sold off a sizable piece of his investments as well.
Most curiously, he’d sold his library as well, all of it—large parcels were shipped to buyers all over the country. The paintings, the piano, the rare sculptures, everything. He didn’t do it all of a sudden and never so much at one time as to arouse anyone’s suspicions, but when I looked at the entire process from what I assumed would have been his perspective, he wasn’t liquidating his wealth as much as he was relocating it. The money—? A great deal of it had been invested in bonds, most of which would be approaching their maturation date in the next few years. But a good portion of it had also been funneled into distant investments. There were stock certificates granting shares of ownership in several banking establishments.
“As near as I could tell, Monsieur was shifting his resources to at least three, possibly more than that, new identities. Poring through those dusty papers, I began to get a clearer sense of the meticulous care that Monsieur had taken to ensure his survival. Durant had kept everything from the first day that Monsieur had engaged his services from an address in Chicago—that was even before Monsieur arrived in Seattle and first purchased the house in which I later grew up.
“Monsieur wrote long letters to Durant, at least once a month, several pages at a time, each one specifically detailing where and how Monsieur wanted his funds moved around. It was quite a story, and I’m sure that in this current era, the equivalent machinations would be of great interest to the tax collectors.
“Monsieur had money coming in from several untraceable sources—his previous identities, I suspected—and he was already in the process of creating new identities and moving resources into their accounts. It was a continuing process for him. The identity in Seattle—? I’m certain he kept that one alive as long as he did specifically for me. He didn’t need it, but he needed me. At least—that’s what I want to believe.”
“But it cost him his life. He was killed in the fire, wasn’t he?”
“Was he?”
I could have bought a new house, I could have built a house to replace the one that was burnt—but I had no desire to do so. Instead, I hired a crew to remove the rubble from the lot where Monsieur’s elegant mansion had stood. I instructed them to proceed carefully, searching for any evidence of a body—
If Monsieur had set the fire himself, and if he had truly wanted to convince the authorities in Seattle of his death, he would have left a body to be discovered charred in the ashes. It would not have been difficult. There was no shortage of men prowling the streets who would not have been missed—even more so, there were many whose sudden absence would certainly benefit the lives of others. Abusers, cutthroats, thieves—all the violent and corrupt who preyed upon those they presumed weaker than themselves.
At one time, I might have assumed that those who preyed were predators, deserving to be removed, and that those they preyed upon were generally good, undeserving of the assault—but now I know otherwise. Too many of those who have been victimized have invited the predations by behaving as victims. A cruel thought? Yes, but when you look at the world through the eyes of a predator, you begin to recognize that we are all predators. Or prey. And it is always a choice. Even the weakest have their own ways of preying on the strengths of those around them.
If it disturbs you to hear that, you can imagine my distress at realizing it. Never mind—I’m getting ahead of myself.
There was no body in the ruins, no coffin either—though I did not call attention to that absence. In the end, when the crews had completed their sad work and hauled away the last of the still stinking timbers, there was nothing left but a black scar on the ground, a scorched reminder, an ugly memory.
On the last day of the work, while I stood surveying the echoes of my life, I was approached by a short fat man in a hound’s-tooth checkered coat. His card identified him as a real estate agent. He wondered if I was considering selling the land, he had several prospective buyers who had expressed interest—
I told that little man that I had not yet decided what I intended to do with the property and strode away, angry—not angry at him, not angry at myself, but angry at Monsieur. If he had not died in the fire, then he had abandoned me—and that was a far far greater loss for me to deal with than the possibility of his death.
I could not fathom why he would suddenly choose to erase himself from my life—or had that been his plan from the beginning? And it had taken him seven years to complete it?
Or—even more distressing—had it been something I had done?
My last letter to Monsieur had been a confession of my grief over losing my relationship with Josiah. I had believed that we had established a mutual devotion akin to the love the poets extolled, but it turned out that I had apparently been deluding myself—I had been infatuated, more in love with the idea of being in love than actually achieving that state—circumstances revealed Josiah to be a predator in his own way, a predator who used physical affection as his deadly bite.
I had been left in a state of emotional turmoil. In my desperation, I had written a long letter to Monsieur—in retrospect, considering it now, perhaps I had not been as discreet in my narrative as I should have been.
Monsieur had cautioned me—as much as we wanted to believe that the mails were secure, we should never depend on that assumption. There were always those whose integrity in the matter was less than they professed. And, to be quite blunt about it, men of our nature were easily preyed upon by blackmailers. He knew. He had dispatched a couple of them himself. Just before moving immediately into a new identity.
Had my letter to Monsieur been opened and read by someone other than the intended recipient? The thought troubled me, growing at the back of my mind like an abscess—because if that letter had raised suspicions around Monsieur, it would have made me even more vulnerable and exposed. But if so, as yet, no one had approached me. And considering my newfound wealth, I would be an ideal target for a blackmailer.
Realizing that, I knew that I needed to protect myself immediately. I also recognized that if anyone knew where Monsieur had gone, it would be the other members of The Community in Seattle. So, although I had begun spending my days rattling through the files in Durant’s office, ignoring the annoyance of Russell the secretary, whose territory I had invaded, I spent my evenings prowling the various dark attractions that The Community favored.
I assumed that I would have no problem reconnecting with Monsieur’s associates, but these are men who spend most of their existence making themselves invisible, unnoticeable, impossible to find. If they do not want to be found, they will not be—you are unlikely to stumble upon them by accident, and even if you do know where to look, you have to know exactly what you’re looking for—I had that advantage.
But if you do not want to be found, you do not put yourself where anyone can find you. In short order, I realized that for all intents and purposes, The Community in Seattle had disappeared. It was as if they no longer existed.
Nevertheless, young men still disappeared from the streets on a regular basis—transients, seamen, and thugs as well—so I knew they had to be here. They just didn’t want me to find them.
All of which suggested that whatever sin I had committed, however much I had hurt or offended Monsieur, my crime had been a crime against all the members of The Community and therefore all the members of The Community would be shunning me. Despite my knowledge, despite my years of service, I was now excluded from their company.
In my grief and loneliness, I allowed Georgie-boy to share my rooms—and my bed. Mrs. Grogan clucked approvingly. And while your mind might go immediately to the carnal aspects of that relationship, let me assure you there was little of that—not because he was not desirable, he was quite that way, but because I had little desire left in me at all.
Whether or not Georgie-boy understood my detachment, he accepted it. Having a warm bed and regular meals was a significant improvement over a makeshift bed under a cold porch, especially during a Seattle winter. Perhaps you will assume that I was taking advantage of him—you could just as easily make the case that he was taking advantage of me. Or perhaps we both used each other for a moment of warmth and comfort against a cold uncaring existence.
At some point, I resolved to be his mentor, teaching him how to be a gentleman the same way Monsieur had taught me. Perhaps we could find an apartment together, a place where he could have a room of his own, I could send him to school, or bring in tutors, and we would share books and music in the evening. We would discuss our daily adventures in front of a comfortable fire. We would have that life.
Or we could travel for a bit. I told him I did not plan on staying in Seattle forever. There was a whole wide world to explore and I had the means to do so. It would be pleasant to have a companion, what did he think?
I shared all of this with Georgie-boy, more than once. He listened with feigned interest, he seemed mostly unenthused. I realized that everything I described—all of this—these were alien experiences to him, he had no referents. I might just as well have been talking to him about a trip to the moon in one of Mr. Verne’s capsules shot from a giant gun. But he said, “If that’s what you would like—” and I realized that he was speaking the standard answer of a street-boy to a patron. Was that how Georgie-boy regarded me? A strange realization began to grow inside me—you cannot purchase affection, only the illusion of it. As much as I had known that in my own desperate time on the street, it was strange to experience it now from the other side.
It saddened me. It made me realize just how much of my life had been built on illusion. Indeed, if there was any reality at all, it was the harshness of the streets. Georgie-boy was a daily reminder of that. From time to time, he would ask me when I planned to leave the city and I knew his questions were not about me as much as they were about himself and his own eventual fate. I could have left at any time, there was nothing really keeping me here—only my own commitment to discover what had really happened with Monsieur. So I deflected his questions, saying only that I could not leave until I concluded my business, and I reassured him each time, telling him that I still had too much to do. I hadn’t solved the problem—
I knew there had to be a way that the members of The Community stayed in contact with each other, I just did not know what it was. I tried placing advertisements in the local newspapers.
We did not have the advantage of an internet. In those days, we used the ads in the personals column as our social media. It could sometimes be very delicious reading, and occasionally a source of some very salacious gossip.
My own ads were usually discreet, but later quite direct:
“Newly returned to Seattle, would like to reconnect with the friends of my uncle.”
“Still looking for the community of immortal souls.”
“I have lost my mentor, I do not know why.”
“Please do not hide from me, I am desperate.”
“Am I not entitled to know why?”
I’m certain that my personal ads must have produced some amusement among the members of The Community who saw them, and possibly some discussion as well, but if any were predisposed to contact me, perhaps their fellows dissuaded them.
There was no response at all—not from The Community at least. I did receive a few odd inquiries that were easily dismissed as coming from cranks or eccentrics. One or two suggested that Jesus would offer me comfort, another simply condemned me to burn in hell for all eternity. There was one inquiry from a young man who, in his own discreet way, inquired whether or not I was possessed of a certain attraction, he did not specify the nature of that attraction and I had little interest in pursuing the matter.
Logically, I should have ended the matter there. I had wealth—enough to sustain me for a long and comfortable life. I could travel if I wished, I could do almost anything I wanted. Monsieur and The Community had sent me a message. “You are not one of us, you will not be one of us. Go away and create a life without us.”
Except that once you know of the existence of a community of immortal men, a community in which all the senses are enhanced and desire is no longer a commodity, but a flavor, then life without access to that experience is a frustrating prison, one in which the only adventure left is to watch yourself grow older and weaker with every passing day.
I imagined myself at the bottom of a dark well, I was climbing a ladder—a seemingly endless climb—but at the top was the irresistible radiance of life, only to find the access barred, an iron grate had been installed across the opening. I could feel the warmth of a distant possibility, a realm that had once beckoned, but I could no longer reach it.
Finally, one afternoon, as I was finishing the last of my readings in lawyer Durant’s files, realizing there was little more to learn—also realizing that there was little in these pages that would point me toward the other members of The Community, I worked up my courage and asked Mr. Durant if I might have a moment with him.
I began by thanking him for his generosity, for helping me decode the various documents and papers in his files, allowing me a glimpse into Monsieur’s history. Seeing the various ways he moved and planned revealed the underlying patterns of his thinking. It was the tangible expression of his soul.
By now, Durant had developed a measure of affection for me—I assumed it was genuine, in those days the practice of law had not yet been completely corrupted, although the process was well under way by the end of that century—but still, Durant’s generosity seemed authentic enough that I felt it appropriate to broach a darker subject.
Nevertheless, I couched my words carefully. I said, “From time to time, Monsieur would attend evening gatherings with other gentlemen like himself, gentlemen of similar interests. Did you ever meet any of them or have any business with them?”
Mister Durant demurred. “I’m not sure who you mean. Your uncle had business and social connections all over the city—indeed, beyond the city as well, as you have seen in his papers.”
“Yes, but—” I hesitated, unsure how to proceed. “—But sometimes I believe he may have spent some time with men who shared some of the same physical infirmities that he did. You know he had an extreme sensitivity to sunlight—”
“Ahh,” said Durant. “Yes. I’m aware of that which you speak. Your uncle preferred to meet with me only after dusk. If we had business that had to be conducted during the day, I would attend him at his home—in a severely curtained room. He was never at his best while the sun was up. What a terrible oppression that must have been. It was as if he could feel the glare of it through the timbers of the building.”
“Perhaps he could. Living with him as long as I did, I was very aware of his condition, his need for darkness—and silence—during the day. When I was in Boston, I studied medicine and discovered that it is not an unknown condition for a man to have his biological cycles so disordered—reversed, if you will—that he is forced to live a nocturnal existence. I assumed that my uncle must have—well, might have—found some comfort or solace in the company of others who shared the same existence. I apologize if there are confidences to which you have been sworn, but if not then I’m curious if you might put me in touch with any of those men. Perhaps one of them might be able to share some insight into my patron’s final days.”
