The book of love, p.3
The Book of Love, page 3
In the window she found Mr. Anabin’s eyes. He said nothing. And there, too, was the reflection of the man who stood at the door.
“I’ll introduce myself,” he said, “since Anabin has no manners. You four left my house before we had much chance to become acquainted. You may call me Bogomil. No need to tell me your names. I know you. You need no names with me.”
Bogomil paused. “Except.” He pointed a long, filthy nail, and Laura, standing closest to Bowie, recoiled. But Bowie did not move. “I wonder if you could tell me what you are called.”
“I don’t know,” Bowie said. He didn’t sound afraid. He sounded in some place far beyond that. “I wish I knew.”
“Old wine in a new bottle, I think,” said Bogomil. “Or maybe only the dregs.”
“His name is Bowie, you freak!” Laura said. Who did this weird person think he was? It was the middle of the night! Everyone should start being nicer and also less confusing. Although now that this person named Bogomil (Really? His name was Bogomil? It sounded like a German breakfast cereal.) was looking at her and not at Bowie, she thought perhaps she had been a little rude. Perhaps the right tack was politeness tempered with firmness. You weren’t supposed to show fear with gods. No, dogs. That was what they said.
“Oh, Laura!” Bogomil said. He took a step into the room. Then another. “Susannah’s lovely sister. Won’t you cry for me. Yes. Daniel elo ello hello. Mo who doesn’t know, not yet. She died of grief. And this one. There’s something familiar about that famine face. No matter, really, how you got out. Just a tick and we’ll put everything right again.”
He took a third step.
There was something about the sound of his dirty feet on the floor that was the worst thing yet. His expression did not change, but the sound suggested contact with the world was agony. As if whatever Bogomil was made of—surely not flesh?—rejected the contact even as it occurred. Or did the floor, that unremarkable linoleum, reject Bogomil? Yes. The whole room, in a kind of agony, refuted Bogomil. He was smiling. But every footfall was a strike on a bell stopped with mud. A clot of blood trembling on a rusted wire.
Bogomil was close enough now that Laura could not escape the familiar reek of him—roses—and under the roses, something burning. Would she ever get that smell out of her clothes? Her hair? It permeated every pore, every orifice. It was the only real thing in the whole world: oh, how could Laura have forgotten? She could feel herself coldly boiling down to nothingness, a vapor. Every thought she had ever had, every stupid thing she’d ever done. Every song she’d ever figured out the chords to. Every verse. Every lyric, every key change. Every drop of night. Each bright day. Any minute now the person called Bogomil would catch them all up and Laura and the others would be carried away like a handful of loose coins.
Bogomil’s finger went up, and just as Laura thought, Do something, oh do something quickly, Daniel said, “Wait. Wait! What do you mean, how we got out? Out of where? And what do you mean, ‘put everything right’?”
Weren’t these, more or less, the same questions Laura had been asking earlier? Not that Laura wasn’t grateful Bogomil wasn’t zapping them with that dirty finger, but if it hadn’t been the time for questions earlier, it most definitely wasn’t the time for questions now. Or the person.
“What is the taste of a soul as it is drawn from between the lips?” Bogomil said. “Who whispers in the darkness? Those are questions for which I have answers. How—you—got—out is my question. You will supply the answer to me. Sooner or later or much later or, if you are lucky, much sooner. Oldest brothers should keep true answers in their pockets, Daniel. Why is the sky blue? Why is the moon so full of hate? What costs more dearly, one’s first death or the second? In simple words: Your guess is correct. You died. You came through the door and into my realm. And then, through some unforeseen chance, you slipped away from me. You passed yourselves through some knot or hole or oubliette, and here you are. In Anabin’s realm. But you know very well you can’t stay. This is no place for the dead.”
As he said it, Laura knew it was true. They had died. They were dead. A flush of embarrassment crept over her, as if she and Daniel and Mo had been caught sneaking into a movie, stolen candy in their pockets. And with Bowie! Who wasn’t even a real person! Real people knew who they were supposed to be, knew their own names and did not have to borrow them. They had their own faces.
Daniel said, “So I was right. We’re dead.”
Mo said, “Bullshit!” He said it so emphatically spit flew out. He wiped his mouth. “We’re here. We’re alive!”
Laura thought once again, without knowing why: Susannah! This is all your fault!
She hadn’t even made it out of high school, to the good parts. For God’s sake, she hadn’t even had sex with a girl yet, which meant that as far as she was concerned, she hadn’t really had sex at all, unless you were going to count lying on a blanket in the sand dunes while some summer guy with scratchy facial hair and a tattoo of a lobster riding a unicorn with magical maine written underneath it—and no sense of timing—fingered you while he humped your thigh, which Laura did not. Meanwhile, Susannah did whatever she wanted. Susannah kissed people on a regular basis, and now Laura was remembering something that had happened right before they had died, which was Susannah kissing someone during “The Kissing Song.” Well, that was what Susannah did during “The Kissing Song.” It was the whole gimmick. Except this time Susannah had kissed Rosamel Walker. Which was typical of Susannah. Kissing people you knew you shouldn’t kiss, as if that were something you could do and not expect there would be repercussions.
Laura didn’t want to be thinking about Susannah. There had been songs that Laura was going to write! She’d had a plan for the next few years. Finish high school. Get a full scholarship at some reasonably good college. On the music side, shitty performances in shitty clubs, followed by better performances at better clubs. Preferably with Daniel and Susannah, but if not, then oh well. There were other musicians in the sea. More songs, more acclaim, more hard work. More life! More!
Finally, if Laura had had any idea she was going to be dead soon, she would have stopped saving up for the Gretsch G5422TG Electromatic Double Cutaway Hollowbody and bought the Epiphone Casino Coupe instead. She’d had enough money for the Epiphone months ago.
“Someone do something,” Laura said. She realized she was whispering. So she tried a second time, really projecting this time. It was like being on stage. You just had to make yourself be heard. Even when you were petrified. Even when your audience looked as if they might be planning to eat you alive. Bogomil grinning at her the whole time. “Mr. Anabin! Hello? Hello! Are you just going to let him do this?”
She dragged her eyes away from Bogomil in his borrowed costume, found Mr. Anabin’s face again in the window glass.
But then Bowie was speaking. “I don’t want to go,” he said. “Anabin. We want to stay. We are asking you to help us.” He took Mr. Anabin by the shoulder and forcibly spun him. As Mr. Anabin turned, so did Bogomil, so that now Bogomil faced the piano, the blackboard, and the clock upon the wall above.
Mr. Anabin said, as if he had been a part of the conversation all along, “If you wish to stay, then Bogomil and I must come to an agreement. Perhaps a game? Or a set of trials, like the old days. With prizes. Bogomil likes those.”
They were all looking now, first to Mr. Anabin and then to where Bogomil stood. Bogomil’s shoulder rose, just a little. He sat down on the end of the piano bench beside the blackboard, still facing away, and lifted the lid. So gently! One finger came down on a black key.
Mo said, “Dead or alive, there’s no way in hell I’m going anywhere with him. No pun intended.”
Daniel said, “Nobody is going anywhere with that guy.”
As if we’d have any choice, Laura thought.
“There must be rules,” Mr. Anabin said.
A finger on that black key again.
“I’ll keep them here,” Mr. Anabin said. “You and I to devise the trial. Something educational? Perhaps a series of tests. If they succeed, you will let them go.”
They waited, hardly daring to breathe, but the black key did not depress. Instead Bogomil stood up and scraped, leisurely, a fingernail down the blackboard. Laura found she could not lift her hands to cover her ears to block out the sound the whole time Bogomil wrote. Her sides grew wet with sweat where her leaden arms hung down. When Bogomil was done writing, there was a message upon the blackboard in a smear of reddish brown.
2 return
2 remain
“Hold on,” Daniel said. “What does that mean?”
But Mr. Anabin was already speaking.
“Done,” he said.
Bogomil turned at this and faced them. He was not smiling, but there was something different in his face now. How beautiful he was! He advanced, not speaking, and Mr. Anabin did not speak, either. Bogomil looked at each of them in turn: Daniel, Mo, and then Laura. Laura returned his look, trying to be as brave as possible, or at least to seem so. If she couldn’t be brave, then at least she could pretend to be brave. It seemed to her that she looked at Bogomil for a very long time. His beauty only increased, until it became a kind of ache inside her, yet she could see nothing good in him. Only horror. And she knew he could see that she was not brave.
At last he looked at Bowie. But Bowie would not look at Bogomil at all. Instead he stared at the floor.
Bogomil took three steps forward until he stood no more than a foot from Mr. Anabin. Mr. Anabin, like Bowie, would not meet Bogomil’s gaze. Bogomil reached out and took Mr. Anabin’s face in his dirty hands. He reached up and touched Mr. Anabin’s hair.
Mr. Anabin smiled. He closed his eyes. “Bogomil,” he said, and Bogomil’s hand fell. He began to shiver and shake until Laura felt he would fly into pieces, but the next moment he was not there at all. Instead a black rabbit crouched on the floor at Mr. Anabin’s feet. Its long ears flicked back and forward; before anyone could move, it dashed between Mr. Anabin and Bowie, zigzagging toward the very back of the classroom, to the door, then between Bowie and Laura, headfirst into the wall below the window. It hit with a bad sound.
Both hind legs were still jerking spasmodically when Mo knelt down beside it, Laura saying, “Oh, be careful, Mo! Be careful!”
But the rabbit’s neck was broken. It was dead. Sometimes things keep moving for a little while after they are dead. The Mayor’s costume lay in a flattened, dirty heap where Bogomil had stood. The room stank of roses.
* * *
—
The first one to speak was Mo, which wasn’t a surprise. His hand was almost always first to go up in class, as if that ever impressed anyone. He and Susannah at a table at What Hast Thou Ground?, sitting and laughing. Look how much fun we’re having. Even his trumpet-playing in band had been showy. He said, “What just happened? Right now? Also, what happened before that? And also before that? What exactly is going on?”
They all looked at Mr. Anabin. He said, “A complicated question with a complicated answer.”
“We’re smart kids,” Mo said. He shot Daniel a malevolent look. Now Laura remembered, too: Mo didn’t like Daniel for a reason that, according to Daniel, was a complete mystery. Even Susannah said she didn’t know. “Well, most of us.”
Daniel said, “All I want to know is if I can go home.”
“Of course we can go home,” Laura said. Before Bogomil had shown up, she’d wanted to know some stuff. She’d had questions. But it was clear that Bogomil was the answer to every single one. Answers were terrible. “We can walk. Daniel, let’s go.”
“You may go home,” Mr. Anabin said. “You should go home. But there are one or two things you must understand first.”
Laura didn’t want to look at Mr. Anabin. Instead she kept her eyes on the dead rabbit.
“Oh,” Mo said. “Sure. I mean, if you’re sure those things aren’t too complicated for us to understand.”
“You were dead,” Mr. Anabin said. “And, yes, what you are now is complicated. Let us put our attention therefore on the most pressing matter. This game, this contest that Bogomil suggests. There will be three trials. Yes. That should suffice. As long as our game runs, and as long as you adhere to its rules, you will stay in the world of the living.”
“What if we don’t want to play some game?” Daniel said.
“Then there will be nothing I can do,” Mr. Anabin said. “By rights you will belong to Bogomil again and he may dispose of you as he chooses.”
“You mean we’ll be dead again,” Mo said.
Mr. Anabin said nothing.
“What does it mean?” Laura said. “What he wrote on the blackboard? Two return, two remain?”
“Bogomil’s math,” Mr. Anabin said. “An equation that will take some time to solve. You asked if you could go home. Go home. But you must not tell anyone about any part of this. That is the first rule. Do not break it. I will arrange an explanation for your absence.”
“How can we tell anyone anything when we don’t know what happened?” Mo said. He went over to the blackboard and picked up the eraser and began to scrub at Bogomil’s writing. “Take, for example, our deaths. Was it a car accident? Bubonic plague? Did we enter a fried-clam-eating contest and win a bad prize? Does anyone remember? Why won’t this eraser just erase? What’s the point of an eraser that doesn’t do the only thing it’s meant to do?”
He banged the eraser against the board and a cloud of dust flew up.
No one said anything. No one could remember, Laura saw. It seemed to her that perhaps Mr. Anabin did not know, either.
“Okay, so table that,” Mo said. “I mean, it’s not like it’s a big deal, how we died. Happens all the time. People die every day getting out of the shower. Checking their email. Making a sandwich. So we died. Who cares how, right? But maybe you can tell us how long we’ve been…not alive…?”
“Where Bowie is concerned, I cannot answer that question,” Mr. Anabin said.
They all looked at Bowie, but Bowie appeared to have no opinion or feelings on the subject of how long he had been dead.
“You three,” Mr. Anabin said, “died almost a year ago. You died at the start of the year and tomorrow is the fourteenth of December. The year is 2014. When you…died, your bodies were not found. There was no trace or explanation of what might have happened. Where you might have gone.”
Laura’s heart turned over. Mom, she thought. Oh, Mom, poor Mom. Poor Susannah. Poor Mom, stuck with just Susannah.
“A year,” Daniel said. His face said he did not believe it.
Mr. Anabin made a gesture with his hand.
“What was that?” Laura said. “You just did something again, didn’t you?”
“It’s fixed,” Mr. Anabin said. “You may go home. There won’t be any questions.”
“Oh, I have questions,” Mo said from the blackboard. “For example, what do you mean ‘it’s fixed’? What exactly is ‘it,’ and also, what do you mean when you say ‘fixed’? And also, how is ‘it’ ‘fixed’?” You could hear every single quotation mark.
“This year the three of you have been abroad,” Mr. Anabin said. “You graduated in the spring after having accepted offers to attend university in Ireland. Full scholarships to a prestigious program at a private conservatory in Ireland.”
“Ireland?” Daniel said. “Why Ireland? Did we actually go there? Did we die in Ireland?”
“But I’m a junior,” Mo said. “I mean I was a junior. When, you know, we died.”
“You graduated a year early,” Mr. Anabin said. “The scholarship was contingent upon your early graduation. Everyone is very proud of you. The three of you. You returned home yesterday for the winter break. An overnight flight to Boston, where I, as the liaison with your program, picked you up. It’s two o’clock in the morning and you are, all of you, in your beds asleep at this very moment. The day that lies ahead is Sunday. Sleep in. On Monday, you will come to this room at two p.m. sharp. I will be waiting.”
Laura listened as Mr. Anabin spoke, and some part of her wanted to believe every word. Did believe. She had not been dead. She had graduated! Accepted a scholarship, gone to the DMV, and had passport photos taken. She’d flown from Boston into Dublin, then taken a bus from Dublin to the outskirts of Cork, been picked up by a van from the conservatory. She’d almost left her suitcase on the bus, she’d been so jet-lagged. She’d been homesick, but it had been an amazing experience. She and Daniel and Mo had gone sightseeing. For example, she’d been in a…castle? Somewhere dark. Cold. She hadn’t been able to get out. The dead rabbit on the floor of the music room said, Remember. Remember death. You were dead. One day you will be dead again.
“What if we don’t come to you?” Daniel said.
“I leave it up to you,” Mr. Anabin said. “You may come to me. If you do not come to me, then Bogomil will come to you.”
While they were thinking about that, he said, “When you come to me, you will tell me what you remember of your death. And here is the first trial. You will accomplish some form of magic. On Monday you will bring me proof.”
“Homework!” Laura said. It almost felt normal. “Let’s go, let’s go. Daniel, come on.”
“Mo?” Daniel said. “You coming? Bowie? You got somewhere to go?”
Mo lived with his famous grandmother in one of the old Victorian houses on the Cliffs. Way above the rest of the town, where people had the most money and the nicest views and didn’t have to worry about king tides or crab migrations or drunk day-trippers in summer wandering out of the dunes and into backyards. Laura had never been inside Mo’s house, but once she’d watched an episode where Oprah had actually come to Lovesend, Massachusetts, to interview Mo’s grandmother. It was an extremely awesome house. Plus, Mo’s grandmother was Mo’s grandmother, successful and celebrated and generally amazing. Laura thought, Mo can take care of himself.
