You went into the cave of Red Faith, even though you knew your son’s soul was new, and there was no point. My mother still called every oncologist in the country begging for a different prognosis for my father, still drove him to radiation even though she knew that the demon mass that attacked his lungs had no intention of ever leaving. You sacrifice a lung, then part of another, you forsake your business, your friends, your girls, and move to another continent to live with a depressed deranged fool—to save one life. You empty the vodka bottles and refill them with water, you stop drinking yourself, hoping it will make your friend drink less—to save one life. You do what you can, even when you fear it’s hopeless. You will probably fail, yes, but you don’t give up. That’s what love is. That’s what faith is. You suffer to live, you struggle to help them. You never surrender. That’s the part I didn’t understand until now—that that was the only true thing that had ever been offered me, the only true thing I had to give her, from the very beginning. Nothing else. Just myself at her feet.” Julian took a breath. “God gave me the power to try again, and that’s what I’m going to do. Besides,” he said, “the Dream Machine didn’t say there was no hope. It said outlook hazy.”
“Well, if Zoltan the Magnificent has spoken.” Shaking his head, Devi sat as if his heart weighed him down. “Imagine the million atoms that make up the smallest thing in the galaxy and that would still be a trillion times larger than every single thing you know and will ever know.” He extended his arm to Julian and supported by him stood up. “Come with me, tiger catcher,” he said with fond and broken resignation. “Stop wasting your precious time on nonsense.”
“Where are we going?”
“Back to Quatrang.”
“Why?” Julian said. “Because as I suspected—there is a way?”
“There is a way,” Devi said. “But you’re not going to like it.”
31
Dark Equinox
“IT’S A TERRIBLE THING FOR A MAN TO FIND OUT THAT ALL HIS life he has been speaking nothing but the truth,” Devi said, quoting Oscar Wilde. “But it’s even worse when no one hears him.”
“Oh, I hear you,” Julian said. “I’m just not listening.”
Devi helped Julian pack up his meager belongings. They said goodbye to Mark at the Junk Shop and returned to Quatrang together.
There had to be ritual before true words could be spoken and listened to: a liturgy of tiger water, of sake, of prayer, of garlic shrimp and kimchi. There was communion: with her books, her playbill, the slivers of her crystal.
“You’re not going to be happy with me,” Devi said, his hands gliding over the artifacts, his mouth moving with inaudible words.
“What else is new,” Julian said. “I’ve hated almost everything you’ve ever said to me.”
“There’s no way out of this without you having to make some hard choices.”
“You mean some more hard choices?” Mutely he and Devi regarded one another. How glib Julian had been once, how careless and cavalier. Uncertainly, he waited.
Devi inhaled. “I don’t know what’s beyond the world I barely understand. I myself did not succeed in what I’m about to offer you—obviously—since I’m still here. But the only way you could even try to return to her and your old self in L.A.,” he said, “is if you leave your body behind.”
Julian zeroed in on Devi’s words.
“You travel back in time with your soul only,” the shaman said.
Julian exhaled. “Leave it behind where?”
“In the river. Ghost rider becomes a black rider. Black rider becomes ghost.”
“Leave it behind,” Julian slowly repeated. “You mean . . . die?”
“Yes.” Devi did not equivocate.
Julian fell silent. Is that why the river was black? Because the hollowed-out bodies after the souls had fled were buried in it? All that relentless gnashing and screaming. It wasn’t imagined. It was real.
“To find her again, I must die?”
Devi did not look happy when he said, “L.A. is her last time on earth, and you are already there with her. If you insist on searching for her again, yes, you will have to find her with nothing but your soul.”
Julian’s breathing was shallow, his thoughts smashing against one another. To have something you’ve never had, you must do something you’ve never done. “How do I do it,” he said. Not how would I do it. But how do I do it.
Devi’s shoulders turned in, as if he’d been