Bathing the Lion (14 page)

Staring at the side of the red elephant, Kaspar suddenly thought of Sivan Ehrenpreis, one of the sexiest women he’d ever known. They’d had an affair a decade ago, but on realizing they had little else in common besides a mutual panting for each other’s bodies, they’d split. Afterward he heard about her from different people—she’d gotten married, had children, gotten divorced, remarried.

The only time he’d ever seen her again was years later standing in front of a toy store window at Christmastime in Brooklyn, holding the hand of a little girl. Sivan looked sensational in a black winter coat and long salmon-colored scarf. Kaspar couldn’t resist going over and saying hello to his old flame.

Later he wished he hadn’t. She’d just gotten out of the hospital after having had a kidney removed. She described in enthusiastic graphic detail how sick she’d been and the medical procedures she’d undergone. When he first saw her that day, even at a distance, he was struck again by her powerful sensuality. Before approaching, he thought with fond longing about the time they’d been together.

But as she spoke about the necrotic parts of her guts that had been cut out, what a laparoscopy entailed, and what “friable kidney fragments” meant, she turned into … a hamburger.

Literally—while listening to her speak, in his mind Kaspar could only see this exquisite-looking woman as a series of specific cuts of meat, like those diagrams mounted behind butchers’ counters showing customers exactly where the meat they were buying came from on a cow’s body. By the time she was finished talking (Sivan had always been a gabber), Kaspar didn’t even want to kiss her cheek good-bye because all he could think about was his mother’s favorite recipe—braised beef cheeks.

“Wait a minute,” he repeated now, his mind racing fast. “Everybody sees something different there, right?” Kaspar pointed to the elephant’s broad side. The others looked at him but said nothing, waiting to hear his point. “Bill, would you tear four blank pages out of your notebook please? Who has something to write with? A pen or pencil—I have one.” He dug a mechanical pencil out of a pocket as Edmonds carefully tore four pieces of paper from his notebook. Jane and Vanessa had pens. Kaspar took the blank sheets and handed one to each person. “All right, everyone draw as best you can what you see up there.” He pointed to the elephant’s side. “It doesn’t have to be good or detailed. Just a quick sketch to get down the broad strokes of what you see and think is important on your map.”

“Why?”

“Because I have an idea; it just came to me when I was thinking about something else. If I’m right it may explain all this.” Glancing down the road, he saw Josephine sitting in the black chair and remembered it was the girl who had called him Muba earlier that day in the store. But he was eager to get this thing going right now with the others so she could wait. He handed his pencil to Dean and waited impatiently for his partner to finish.

It took a while. It took much more time than Kaspar had imagined because once they began, everyone wanted to make their drawing look right. None of them knew how to draw so the job was harder. How do you do mountains when you have no artistic ability? Lots of craggy squiggles so stupid-looking and inept that you start again immediately, messing up the paper by scratching things out. How do you draw intricate hieroglyphics with a black roller ball pen and no talent? Lots of unsteady lines …

The only person not making an irritated or frustrated face was Vanessa, who actually hummed as she worked. She was drawing both from what she saw on the elephant’s hide and from her memories of Chummie Recel’s childhood map. Some of her stars had the classic five points while others were just thick black dots. She had fun doing it, but her drawing was awful. When Dean saw it he grinned and gave a scornful snort: leave it to his wife to draw what looked like a third grader’s astronomy project.

Sheepish about their efforts but curious to see what he was planning to do with them, they handed their drawings to Kaspar when they’d finished. Bill Edmonds again tore his page very precisely out of his pocket notebook.

Bill’s was the best drawn so after collecting them, Kaspar put it on top. Once he had them all, he stacked the sheets together. Like the different parts of Sivan Ehrenpreis’s body, he thought if he gathered the different sketches together in the proper order they might combine somehow to show something not there in the five separate drawings.

No luck. No divine lights rose up slowly behind them accompanied by a choir singing Handel’s “Messiah.” The stack of wildly different drawings did not vibrate or shape shift in Kaspar Benn’s hands. Nada. Nothing.

“
Well?
” Vanessa widened her eyes questioningly.

Kaspar could only shrug. He kept looking at the papers, still hoping something would happen.

Dean didn’t notice their exchange because he was looking with interest at the elephant, the girl, the black chair, and then back at the child. “I
know
her.” He pointed. “We saw her on the roof the other day.”

“That’s Josephine—she lives with me. She’s my daughter. Well, not really my daughter, but—” Edmonds was interrupted by Jane.

“The daughter you were
supposed
to have but never did,” Jane said, more surprised than Bill as the words spilled from her mind and mouth.

“And the chair was in the children’s book that saved you when you broke up with your girlfriend,” Edmonds answered her right back, just as stunned as Jane at what he said. He had no idea where the information had come from.

“The elephant told you in a dream about the cancer when you were a kid, huh, Dean?” Kaspar said this next, despite never having seen nor heard anything about …
Muba
! The little girl had asked him earlier in the store why he didn’t remember that name!

How could any of them know the intimate things they’d just said to one another almost simultaneously? Where had the knowledge come from? Why in a flash had they begun to see into the deepest recesses of each other’s minds, memories, and places where they kept their biggest secrets? It was as if they were now able to move in and out of each other’s heads.

Whatever was happening to them was clearly out of their control. They were given glimpses, peeks under the curtain, flashes of understanding and insight into each other’s lives, histories, hearts, and secrets. It was jarring and riveting in its way but most of all unstoppable. As the five people stood there, the most intimate knowledge of each other’s lives entered each other’s minds in spits and spurts, fragments and odd-shaped pieces like shrapnel.

The five of them reacted differently to the experience. Jane pressed the heels of both hands against her forehead as if suffering a migraine. Edmonds stared straight ahead, transfixed, as did Kaspar. Dean and Vanessa jerked their heads as if being poked from all sides by invisible fingers.

Sitting in Blackwelder, Josephine clapped her hands and bounced up and down, much to the chair’s discomfort. It protested, “Stop that. Please, it hurts!”

But the mechanic who had come to earth disguised as a little girl to help these five people didn’t stop bouncing because she was too excited. Finally it was happening—the joining
had
begun.

SEVEN KLEEMS

ONE

He was distraught, alone, exhausted; it was early evening in a foreign city six thousand miles from home. Everything around him was dark and silent; it made the world in the room larger and more ominous. He was bleary eyed, blinking hard, and working to get his full sight back after a two-hour nap to drag his brain out from under the heavy tarpaulin of jet lag. He sat on the side of a spongy hotel bed in his underpants with a cell phone in his hand, trying through a thick head of just-woke-up/not-really-awake to figure out what time it was in the United States: six hours behind or ahead—noon or midnight? Was it all right to make the call now? He knew he must and whatever time it was over there didn’t matter. He was cold and only a moment ago realized he was shivering, but whether from cold or alarm he didn’t know. It was interesting to watch his free hand quiver on his bare knee. Although he held the phone in his other hand, he put it on top of the shaking one, but it did no good.

Maybe he should pee. Stand up and go to the toilet, have a long satisfying piss, come back empty, and
then
make the call. He’d read somewhere a full bladder raises blood pressure. Right then he felt his blood pressure was probably high enough to lift the
Hindenburg
.

When the phone in his hand vibrated and then a moment later rang he was so surprised he dropped it on the floor, his hand stiffening like it’d gotten an electrical shock. The small blue phone rang a second time, juddering on the wooden floor before he could retrieve it. His heart galloped inside his chest.

“Hello?”

“Kaspar, it’s Dean.”

“Dean! I was just going to call you. Really, the phone was in my hand.”

“I tried and tried before but first you were flying and then I couldn’t get through. Anyway, you had the dream too, right?”

Kaspar straightened, swallowed, and answered carefully. “Yes, on the plane ride over here. I don’t know how long it lasted. I slept a few hours but who knows how long the dream was. It blew my mind!”

There was rustling and background noise on the other end before Dean spoke again. “Everyone else is here. I’ve got you on speaker phone so we can all talk about it together.”

Kaspar rubbed his mouth. “Why did this happen when I was on a fucking plane to Europe? Can someone explain
that
to me? I’m home all the rest of the year. Why did it happen now?”

In a quieter voice Jane offered, “Maybe there’s a good reason for it. Maybe there’s something over there you’re supposed to find that’ll help us figure it out.”

“Like what, a Wiener schnitzel?”

In the background Bill Edmonds asked, “Where is he again?”

Vanessa said, “Vienna. Vienna, Austria.”

“Why?”

“He’s buying loden for the store.”

“What’s loden?”

“Dean?”

“Yeah, Kaspar?”

“What does everybody else there think? What do
you
say about it?”

“Everybody has a different opinion. Basically the only thing we agree on is
we all shared the same dream last night
. Or all of our dreams were stitched together into one big one that we shared. A lot of what’s happening in our real lives was in it, but a lot was also wrong or distorted or just plain crazy.”

Vanessa said, “We brought ourselves and our brains
to
the dream and they all got mixed up together in it like they’d been thrown into a blender.…”

“Jesus, it’s true then; it really
did
happen.”

“Plus we figured out each one of us brought an important secret from our lives to the dream too: Vanessa and I brought the elephant; Edmonds his daughter, Josephine; Jane the chair—”

“Wait a minute.” In the background Jane’s voice got louder. “There was nothing from you, Kaspar. All of us brought something very important from our lives into the dream, some sort of talisman, except you.”

Vanessa said, “Wow, right.”

“It’s true—he
didn’t
bring anything.”

This talk rumbled back and forth until Dean said, “It’s a good point, Kaspar. Why do you think that is?”

Kaspar closed his eyes and squeezed them tight. “Look, I’m sitting here completely goggle-headed in Vienna, Austria, having just shared a dream on an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean with four people in Vermont. And you’re asking me why I didn’t
bring
anything to the dream?
How am I supposed to know the answer?
I’m lost here, kids, totally lost. Can someone there tell me what’s going on so I can keep my head from exploding?”

A silence followed, long enough for Kaspar to regain his composure and speak without any more rancor in his voice. “All right, just tell me what else you discussed. How did you all find out you’d experienced it together?”

“Vanessa woke up this morning in a tizzy and said I had to hear about her dream. Naturally when she described it I went bananas. I told her I had the same one, we flipped out together, and started comparing notes about it. Then Jane called and told us
her
dream.”

Jane said, “I called them because Bill called me before. But listen to this, Kaspar—
Bill didn’t know my phone number
. He said I gave it to him in the dream.”

“Your
telephone
number?”

Edmonds said, “Yes. In my dream she wrote it down in my notebook. I remembered the number when I woke up because it’s an easy one—555-8778.”

Jane said, “But my number is unlisted. There’s no way Bill could have gotten it unless I gave it to him.”

Kaspar rubbed his eyes and blinked hard several times to clear them. “What happened next?”

“We all came here to Dean’s house to talk about it. When he couldn’t reach you on the phone earlier, he told us to come back later and he’d try again.”

“And?”

“And nothing—we just told you what we know.”

“But it’s not enough! We went to sleep last night and
all
of us shared the same dream—”

Vanessa interrupted. “No, you’re wrong, Kaspar. It’s one of the things we discovered by talking: we
were
all together in the same dream, but none of us knew what was going on inside each other’s head. It’s like we were all in the same movie or play. But we didn’t know what was going to happen from moment to moment or what the other people would say.”

“None of us expected a red elephant or a talking chair. They just appeared and we all saw them,” Jane added.

“Or a men’s store that time travels back into a news store.”