bricks were just piles of bricks, and the tangles of weeds were just tangles of weeds. There were no faces, but—
—but they were here. It wasn’t your imagination.
He believed that. He couldn’t capture the essence of the memory, its quality of beauty and transcendence, but it seemed perfectly real. It was just that his memory of those moments before he had passed out seemed like photographs taken on the best day of your life. You can remember what that day was like—sort of, anyway—but the pictures are flat and almost powerless.
Jake looked around the desolate lot, now filling up with the violet shadows of late afternoon, and thought: I want you back. God, I want you back the way you were.
Then he saw the rose, growing in its clump of purple grass, very close to the place where he had fallen. His heart leaped into his throat. Jake blundered back toward it, unmindful of the beats of pain each step sent up from his ankle. He dropped to his knees in front of it like a worshipper at an altar. He leaned forward, eyes wide.
It’s just a rose. Just a rose after all. And the grass—
The grass wasn’t purple after all, he saw. There were splatters of purple on the blades, yes, but the color beneath was a perfectly normal green. He looked a little further and saw splashes of blue on another clump of weeds. To his right, a straggling burdock bush bore traces of both red and yellow. And beyond the burdocks was a little pile of discarded paint-cans. Glidden Spread Satin, the labels said.
That’s all it was. Just splatters of paint. Only with your head all messed up the way it was, you thought you were seeing—
That was bullshit.
He knew what he had seen then, and what he was seeing now. “Camouflage,” he whispered. “It was all right here. Everything was. And . . . it still is.”
Now that his head was clearing, he could again feel the steady, harmonic power that this place held. The choir was still here, its voice just as musical, although now dim and distant. He looked at a pile of bricks and old broken chunks of plaster and saw a barely discernible face hiding within it. It was the face of a woman with a scar on her forehead.
“Allie?” Jake murmured. “Isn’t your name Allie?”
There was no answer. The face was gone. He was only looking at an unlovely pile of bricks and plaster again.
He looked back at the rose. It was, he saw, not the dark red that lives at the heart of a blazing furnace, but a dusty, mottled pink. It was very beautiful, but not perfect. Some of the petals had curled back; the outer edges of these were brown and dead. It wasn’t the sort of cultivated flower he had seen in florists’ shops; he supposed it was a wild rose.
“You’re very beautiful,” he said, and once more stretched his hand out to touch it.
Although there was no breeze, the rose nodded toward him. For just a moment the pads of his fingers touched its surface, smooth and velvety and marvellously alive, and all around him the voice of the choir seemed to swell.
“Are you sick, rose?”
There was no answer, of course. When his fingers left the faded pink bowl of the flower, it nodded back to its original position, growing out of the paint-splattered weeds in its quiet, forgotten splendor.
Do roses bloom at this time of year? Jake wondered. Wild ones? Why would a wild rose grow in a vacant lot, anyway? And if there’s one, how come there aren’t more?
He remained on his hands and knees a little longer, then realized he could stay here looking at the rose for the rest of the afternoon (or maybe the rest of his life) and not come any closer to solving its mystery. He had seen it plain for a moment, as he had seen everything else in this forgotten, trash-littered corner of the city; he had seen it with its mask off and its camouflage tossed aside. He wanted to see that again, but wanting would not make it so.
It was time to go home.
He saw the two books he’d bought at The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind lying nearby. As he picked them up, a bright silver object slipped from the pages of Charlie the Choo-Choo and fell into a scruffy patch of weeds. Jake bent, favoring his hurt ankle, and picked it up. As