Gypsies Read online

  All those years ago, Karen thought. Who was I mourning for?

  Can a bullet really be undone? By wishing?

  She was dazed for hours, puzzling over it.

  But not just that. There was the atmosphere of Turquoise Beach itself, the easy lifestyle Laura seemed so content with. Karen was less pleased by it. It was aimlessly hedonistic, and she was not sure she wanted Michael exposed to it much longer. He had taken a liking to Emmett, Laura’s downstairs boyfriend: Emmett, who played music for a living, and whom Karen had observed down by the beach at night smoking grass.

  All this contributed to Karen’s stress. But it was Laura who started the argument, when she insisted on talking about Michael.

  Michael had gone to bed. Laura was up finishing the dishes. Karen had put on her nightgown and robe but couldn’t sleep; so she sat in the kitchen under the cool fluorescence of the ceiling lights, listening to the wet clack and rattle from the sink.

  Laura declined her offer to dry and said, “You really ought to talk to him, you know.”

  “Michael’s doing fine,” Karen said. “He’s adjusted well these last few days.”

  “I don’t think platitudes are too useful right now, do you? You know what I mean.”

  “The talent,” Karen said. “Does it always have to come around to that?”

  “This time it does. Haven’t you thought about how confusing this all must be for him? Not just Turquoise Beach, but all that mess before you left—the Gray Man. What’s he supposed to think about it?”

  I would prefer, Karen thought, that he didn’t think about it. She knew how ridiculous that would sound. But it would be simpler—“It would be simpler,” she said, “if we could just lead a normal life here.”

  “Normal!” Her sister dropped a plastic gravy boat into the drainer. “You hold up that word like it’s some kind of holy relic! I mean, I understand—but Christ, Karen, I’m not sure ‘normal’ is something you and I can aim for!”

  “For Michael’s sake—”

  “I’m talking about Michael’s sake. He’s a smart kid, he’s curious, and I think he deserves whatever explanation we can give him.”

  Karen was silent a while. Finally she said, “I was hoping to keep him above all this.”

  “It’s a little past that.”

  Laura dried her hands and sat at the small butcher-block table.

  “Michael is a bright, curious kid. He should be talking to you about all this, not me.”

  Karen looked up sharply. “He’s talked to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “The truth.”

  Karen was shocked. “Everything? I mean—back home, Tim and Daddy, all that?” “All that.”

  She was mortified. All this had happened behind her back. “He’s hardly ready! He’s only fifteen!” It was like a conspiracy. “Jesus, Laura, he’s my son! I have a right to make some choices!”

  “He’s your son. And I’m sorry if I interfered. But he’s also a very confused young person badly in need of answers. He should have come to you… but he didn’t. He didn’t feel like he could.”

  “So instead he came to you? Why?” She felt wounded. “Because you inhabit this hippie Utopia here? So what did you tell him? That everything would be okay if we all wore tie-dye and denim a little more often?”

  Laura stood up and went back to the sink. She faced the window, which was full of night, and Karen could see her face reflected there, lips pressed tightly together.

  Laura said, “This is the best I could do. You understand that? I think… whatever this talent we have is, I think it’s connected somehow with imagination. The ability to see what isn’t there, at least the shape of it, the outline. I wanted to find the best place I could, a place to live, a sane place—I wanted to dream it into existence. And this is the best I could do.” Her shoulders moved in a shrug. “Maybe I didn’t do too well.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Maybe Michael could do better. Did you ever consider that?”

  She was taken aback. “Michael?”

  “It’s obvious enough. Look at him sometime. I mean, really look.” Laura turned away from the window. Her fingers were tight against the rim of the counter. “I think he’s more talented than any of us… more talented even than Tim.”

  But it was not something Karen wanted to think about.

  Bad enough that Michael had to know about all this. Bad enough that she had brought him here; bad enough that Laura had dragged him into all that old family misery. Bad but, okay, maybe understandable. He was a part of it, and maybe she should have talked to him.

  But she had not wanted to admit to herself that Michael himself might have the talent.

  Had not allowed herself to admit it. It was the Great Unthinkable. The last time she had considered the idea—the memory came rushing back—was when she was pregnant. Michael had not been Michael then, had only been this presence inside her, an awkward weight, a coiling of life against her belly. Lying in bed at night, feeling him kick, she had allowed the thought: What if he is like me? She guessed it was like having one of those genetic diseases, that disease Woody Guthrie had. It had corrupted her life and might corrupt her child’s.

  Could she bear that?

  She had pressed herself against Gavin, who was sleeping soundly, until his warmth suffused her body. She resolved then, drifting toward a troubled sleep, that she would not even consider the possibility. Their child would be normal. She would make him normal. She would wish him into normalcy, pray him into normalcy; their home would be a normal home. Surely that was enough?

  So Laura was right, of course. She had made an icon of that word, “normal.” It was a gift, and she had tried to give that gift to Michael.

  Tried and—well, it should have been obvious— failed.

  She raised her head and regarded her sister. “You’re saying I was the one who ran away… who hid.”

  “I believed that once. I don’t think I can be so self-righteous now. I think we both ran away from it, each of us in our own way.” She added, “Michael’s different.”

  Fearfully: “What do you mean?”

  “He never learned to be afraid of it. He’s been asking questions you and I can’t answer. Did we inherit this? Is it a miracle, or is it something we can understand?”

  Karen shook her head. “There aren’t any answers.”

  “We can’t be sure of that. We never really tried to find them.”

  “How would we?”

  “Karen, I don’t know. But I think we would have to start at home, with Mama and Daddy. And we would probably have to talk to Tim.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Is it?”

  “We’re safe here.” Laura said, “Are we?” “What do you mean?”

  She spoke in careful, somber tones. “The Gray Man. That’s something else we never talked about. But he’s the same man, isn’t he? The same man we saw that night in the ravine, with Tim, all those years ago.”

  Karen was precipitated suddenly back into her dream, the dark streets of that other seaside town, cold cobbles against her bare feet, and the Gray Man (it was him), offering gifts from the cavernous hollow of his coat. And Laura remembered it, too; therefore it wasn’t a dream, it was a memory; and only her desperate wanting had convinced her otherwise. She said, “He can’t find us here.”

  “I would dearly love to believe that. Only I’m not sure it’s true. We just don’t know. And isn’t that the point? We don’t know enough to protect ourselves.”

  “You said we’d be safe here!”

  “Safer than where you were. But I can’t guarantee for how long.”

  Karen whispered, “I don’t want to go back home… I don’t want to dig up all that trouble.”

  Laura straightened the dish towel and hung it to dry. She walked to where Karen sat, put her hands on Karen’s shoulders. The touch was cool, soothing. “Neither do I,” she said. “You don’t know how mu
ch I don’t want to go home. I wouldn’t do it for myself. You want the honest truth, I don’t believe I would do it for you. But I think we should do it for Michael.”

  3

  Laura slept downstairs that night, with Emmett.

  The affair was on-again, off-again, usually at Laura’s call. Emmett was almost pathologically easygoing about relationships. If Laura wanted to be his lover, fine. If she had something else to do or somebody else to see, well, he could live with that, too.

  It was not an unhealthy attitude—it pretty much mirrored her own approach—but it lacked something in the way of passion.

  But tonight she needed his warmth. She lay beside him in his bed, a beat-up four-poster he had acquired at a junk shop in Pueblo de Los Angeles, cradled in this outrageous down-filled mattress. They had made love and now the bedroom was dark and cool, a comforting place. Sometimes she liked to imagine Emmett’s bed as a sailing ship drifting out to sea, timbers creaking. She thought that was a fine way to fall asleep.

  Emmett sat up, lit a joint, offered it to her. She toked, but only lightly. She was afraid it might make her paranoid. It was good, though, to take the rough edges off things. Tonight she wanted gentility, calm, ease.

  Outside the bamboo blinds there was darkness and the sound of the tide coming in. Emmett’s big hand moved in time, stroking her shoulder. The sheet on Emmett’s bed was light and cool as rain. Emmett toked deeply; she saw the tip of the joint flare in the darkness.

  She said, not exactly meaning to, “What would you think if I went away?”

  Emmett, whose reaction time was glacial even when he was not stoned, thought it over. Eventually he said, “Where are you going? How long?”

  She moved her hand through the bristly hair on his chest. “Can’t say where. Maybe for a while.”

  “Long time?”

  “Could be long. What would you say?”

  “I would ask,” Emmett said thoughtfully, “whether you were coming back.”

  “Coming back probably for sure.” She added, “You’re dodging the question.”

  “You know the answer.” He sat cross-legged, and she admired the way the trickle of moonlight played over the exposed ridge of his hips. Pale flesh like distant mountains. He said, “I’d miss you ’til you came back.”

  It should have pleased her. Oddly, it didn’t. She was annoyed both with Emmett and with herself. What did she want him to say? “I can’t live without you”? “Stay or I’ll shoot myself”? She had cultivated a certain kind of relationship with him and she could hardly complain if he cooperated in it.

  But (the irritation peaking now) it was not just Emmett, it was everything, Turquoise Beach, her life here. Karen’s visit had jogged too many old memories. Laura had arrived here straight out of the heady psychedelic whirl of Berkeley at the end of the sixties, and Turquoise Beach had seemed like a distant colony, a gentler outpost of that same dizzying empire. And yet. And yet. In those days she had been full of energy, obsessed with the idea of going beyond, further, deeper. Since then, imperceptibly, by inches, her life had slowed. The final revelation, what they used to call the White Light in her sophomore LSD sessions, remained always out of grasp. And so the fervor cooled. Life became merely pleasant.

  Her sometimes affair with Emmett was pleasant. It would always be pleasant. But Karen was—and this had taken Laura by surprise—a chastening example. Karen had showed up with her compulsive conformity, her exaggerated regard for the “normal,” her fears all intact; but Laura saw the way she cared for her son—cared for him profoundly, wordlessly, wholeheartedly—and understood that her own passions were trivial by comparison; that her idea of love was something truncated and selfish. Karen loved Michael in a way that was genuinely beyond, further, deeper.

  She felt a wave of vertigo from Emmett’s highly potent grass. The bed seemed to rotate backward. The night had closed in, suddenly, like a wall.

  Love, she thought, is a very dangerous thing.

  Emmett stretched out, moving toward sleep. He turned his head against the pillow. “You know,” he said distantly, “Mike was right… you are kinda spooky.”

  But time passed, a week, ten days, and she began to think she had been unnecessarily alarmed, unreasonably paranoid… until the evening Michael came home ashen-faced and said he had seen the Gray Man out along the beach.

  Chapter Seven

  “Who is he?” Michael couldn’t restrain the question any longer. “Where does he come from?”

  But his mother and his aunt only exchanged furtive glances, as if to acknowledge some mutual guilt, a contract whose terms had come due at last.

  He had climbed up the bluffs once again, the same place he’d talked to his aunt a couple of weeks back.

  Michael understood why she liked this place. Turn one direction and you could see Turquoise Beach laid out between its hills in clean, logical blocks. Turn back and there was the ocean, sunlight glinting off the whitecaps. The height made everything seem far away and very still, very schematic.

  Today even the air was calm. He stationed himself so that he could see the sandier part of the beach north of here, where a few people had laid out towels to catch this burst of late October sunlight. He watched the distant shapes of their sand-colored bodies and plucked out aimless tunes on the flat-top Gibson. He was a little more nimble-fingered now; he’d been practicing every day. He played Beatles tunes and thought with some amusement how impressed Emmett would be. Hey, he thought, if we stay here I’ll be a songwriter; I’ll call myself Lennon McCartney.

  He had been exercising his other talent, too, these last few weeks.

  Laura had taught him a lot. She had shown him the importance of discipline, control. “You have a great talent,” she had said, “in the raw, but you have to learn to focus it—to aim it. It’s the difference between going where you want to go and being tossed around in a storm. You have to know where you’re going and you have to know how to get back.”

  She was with him the first time he made a door. In an angle of beach between two big stones Michael opened a passage and held it open while the two of them stepped through. Stepped from Turquoise Beach into the deserted shore he had glimpsed through the window of his fingers, seal herds moving in dark masses along the sand. He came into the sunshine with Laura behind him, and the seals looked up all at once, bobbing their heads with a distant, oblique curiosity. Michael understood that no one had ever hunted these animals… knew without thinking about it that this was a planet empty of man.

  Laura guided him back, congratulated him, and told him not to do it again.

  He was startled. “Why?”

  “Because it’s not a toy,” she said. “Because it might be dangerous. And there’s another reason. I don’t know for sure, but I think it might draw attention … I wonder if it isn’t a kind of beacon light.”

  Because, Michael thought, unlike the seals, we are being hunted. She didn’t say it but that was what she meant. Someone is hunting us.

  Standing on the promontory, alone now, he made a tiny window between his fingers. Surely this would not attract attention?

  And he looked between his fingers down at the distant beach and felt a first tentative rush of energy inside him… and then he hesitated.

  Something familiar down there…

  And in the Circle of his fingers, Michael saw the Gray Man.

  The shock was immense. He dropped his hands to his side, wiped them on his jeans as if he had touched something foul. He backed up slowly and then crouched down so the tall grass and the slope of the promontory would hide him.

  He crept forward again, sweating.

  The Gray Man, Walker, was still there, was down on the beach among the bathers in his gray overcoat and hat like a bad hallucination. Incredibly, no one paid him any attention. He was invisible, Michael guessed. It was magic. Walker could do that—make himself unnoticed in a crowd. None of this seemed unlikely anymore.

  And now the Gray Man regarded him across that dista
nce.

  Michael felt exposed, naked. He sees me. He realized that Laura had been right, the Gray Man was drawn to his energy, maybe drawn whether he practiced it or not, drawn down through the hidden doors of the world; that he could be evaded but not ultimately escaped. He sees us, Michael thought.

  He stood up. There was no longer any reason not to.

  A communication had been established now, a contact. He peered down across the rocky beach at the Gray Man and the Gray Man seemed to swell and occupy the whole of his field of vision. Michael imagined he could hear the Gray Man’s voice inside his head, softly insinuating.

  You deserve an explanation, the Gray Man said. I can give you that.

  No, Michael thought. No bargain. He was being hunted; he knew that now. He would be crazy to accept any kind of offer… he was crazy to be standing here like this, hypnotized.

  But the voice was very compelling.

  I know you, Michael.

  He felt the truth in this.

  I know you better than they do.

  Walker moved toward the headland now. His motion was cautious, delicate; his eyes were on Michael’s eyes. Even over that distance Michael felt the pressure.

  The Gray Man said, Come with me. Where? Michael wondered. Where does he want me to go?

  The answer was immediate. He blinked and in the darkness behind his eyelids he saw an ancient industrial town, cobbled streets, tall black buildings, a stone gate engraved with the image of an eye and a pyramid. Well, hell, Michael thought, I could go there if I wanted. He was proud of his new abilities. I could find that place.

  We can go there together.

  It wasn’t very far…

  But he was distracted by a flicker of color on the beach. A little girl ran up from the shore, bright yellow one-piece bathing suit. She ran toward the Gray Man. She can see him, Michael realized. She was something his magic had neglected. She ran toward him and then hunkered down and stared at him, this mystery, the Invisible Man, or at least a man who wasn’t dressed for the beach.