Walking back to the apartment from Dillard's, Jake and E. E. watched the sidewalk and the sky, not talking about their mutual insanity.
At the bottom of the stairs that led up to their fifth floor apartment, Jake stopped. There was no point walking up all those stairs. He would just have to go down them all later, and he suspected it would be harder to make himself do that than to climb into his car and search the stations for songs about the death he was surely driving to find. My Chemical Romance, maybe.
He said, "Well, I'm off to see the Fates. Want to come?"
E. E. nodded, unsurprised, but said, "I think I'll pass. See you when you get home."
"Hope so."
Jake wanted to say something else, to keep talking and delay the moment, but also to leave on different words than those. After the day's gay jokes, he wasn't about to tell E. E. that he valued their friendship, and the only other thing he could think to say alluded to an episode of M. A. S. H., which E. E. abhorred as something even more death-filled and depressing than The Black Parade.
So Jake pulled his keys from his pocket and picked a direction to walk in, not remembering if his car was that way or not. When he'd gotten half a block away, he glanced back at the empty doorway of the apartment building.
In it you'll find my will. I've left everything to the Hawkeye Pierce Memorial Brothel.
3rd and Maple. Jake repeated it until it was a mantra. Find car, unlock, open door, sit, search for seatbelt. 3rd and Maple. Listen to the whiny teenager sound of the engine starting. 3rd and Maple. He drove away from the apartment, trying to keep his mind off his destination.
His mother would never have been able to find it. Delilah got lost twice a week. She'd be lost in thought and wind up in Nebraska, but no great inventions came out of those long thoughts. No great novel. Not even a pyramid scheme.
That same bad sense of direction leaked into every area of her life. She could never remember times or dates or even in what order things had happened in the past. Not whether or not the Civil War happened before or after Custer's Last Stand, but whether her trip to South Padre Island was before or after her last weekend rendezvous with Zeus, when Jake was at band camp one summer.
She made no good decisions. Though, he realized, she would disagree.
"The decision that brought me you was a good one," he could hear her say.
He didn't tell her that there was a difference between a bad choice with unawful consequences and a good choice.
Does this decision fall in either category? The ignored voice whispered to Jake.
The street numbers counted down as if to a shuttle launch or a New Year's celebration. It didn't seem to fit. Jake wanted to count up, one two three, preparing himself to dive, to perform some feat of strength or daring.
3rd Street.
He took a right, and the gas stations and liquor stores and used car lots dwindled to neighborhoods.
He knew Maple Street before he was close enough to read the sign, and he knew the house as soon as he saw it. The small creatures of the immortal world sent an anxious pounding through his chest. Maybe it was the immortality in him recognizing the immortality in them. Maybe something in him sensed their presence, and Jake's responding anxiety attack was Pavlovian. He didn't know.
But the house on the corner of 3rd and Maple sent such a thrumming through Jake's body that the front bumper of his car came within inches of the driver's side door of an oncoming car. Then he swerved and almost took off the door of a parked truck and one of the truck owner's legs.
He pulled off the road as soon as he could and got out before he could provide anyone else with a near-death experience.
The house was nothing special. It was in a middle-income neighborhood, safe enough that parents let their children throw footballs in the street. The house itself had a healthy lawn and bright yellow siding. The blinds inside the windows were open, but the glare made seeing inside impossible. Massive wind chimes hung from the porch roof, releasing a gonging melody like church bells.
Jake stood on the sidewalk, hyperventilating. He could leave. He didn't have to go inside. No one was making him do this. He could go home now, and everything would just continue on the way it was.
He walked forward. When he made it to the porch, the wind chimes near enough his ear to make his brain vibrate, he stopped again to hyperventilate some more.
There wasn't a doorbell. Jake knocked.
And then he was lying on his back on the sidewalk, his tailbone aching.
Hm. Some dormant stubbornness in Jake put him back on his feet and brought him back to the porch, where he stood, trying to force his mind past the terror and the wind chimes and the pain.
Zeus had been afraid of the Fates because they are old, temperamental women. Old women like knitting. Jake searched for more stereotypes. They like choirs and doilies and good manners.
Good manners.
Jake kept his hands away from the door and said, "I beg your pardon, but there is a question I would like to answer if you don't mind. Please."
There was a pause, as though the door was considering his words, then it swung open, and Jake repressed a laugh of triumph. But the laugh was forgotten as he stepped into the house. Three women sat in an unremarkable living room, looking up at him. Two sat on a wide, comfortable-looking couch, and the third sat on a matching armchair. They were old, but not decrepit. There was no hint of illness or tiredness about them. They had soft wrinkles and silver hair, but Jake knew they would stand from their places at the couch and chairs with ease, just as he knew that what he was seeing was not any kind of truth, only a face put on for a stranger.
"Thank you," he blurted.
"What do you want?" one of them asked.
"Excuse me? I—"
"You want something from us. They all do. What is it? A magic carpet? Limitless wealth? An Everlasting Gobstopper? No, wait. I can tell by the shape of your nose. You want a love potion."
Jake imagined Rachel leaning close to him like she used to, her head against his chest, and he could breathe in the strawberry scent of her hair.
"No, Atta, that's not it. This one doesn't have trouble getting girls. He's a son of Zeus, can't you tell?"
The two of them looked at him the way they would examine a half-pleasant and only mildly interesting portrait. The third seemed to watch them all vaguely, like a predictable television show, her eyes drifting from their faces to the lamps to the windows and back again.
"I want to be mortal," Jake said. Their obvious concealment, whatever they were concealing, made him nervous. He wanted to be outside, where there was air and a firmer idea of reality. "I want the immortal world to leave me alone."
"Of course you do," Atta said. "We know you, Jake. Of course."
"Have you tried eating more garlic?"
"Gracious, Chloe! He's not trying to keep away vampires. Next you'll suggest he wear a crucifix."
"No, never. That just attracts attention."
"How about bathing in the River Styx? Would that help?"
"You're always trying to get people to bathe in Styx. People come back exactly the same except they have leeches on their bottoms."
In the middle of a giggle, Chloe sneezed, and for a moment the image of the room shimmered and Jake saw past it, saw the women as young, beautiful, shining creatures. There was no white in their eyes, only a shining, coal blackness. Their skin was milk pale, their long pianists' fingers making music at a loom. No, Jake thought as the image vanished. Not a loom, The Loom. Strands colored like the fragments of light in a diamond, strands as thick as an arm and as thin as spider's web, strands straight, twisted, smooth, rough-textured, shining, darkening, steaming, iced over—more numerous than numbers, woven already and always being woven by wise hands that knew the time for compassion and the time for cruelty. The finished but never finished section, where the living strands met and crossed and knotted and vanished, was the whole universe of time, every breath and heartbeat and blink of mankind. And it is beautiful the way your mother's voice is beautiful when you are a child. It is beautiful like falling asleep for the first time with your forever and only one. It is lovely and breathless and infinite.
When the old women in their sunlit house leapt back into his eyes, Jake doubted his mission for the first time. Why would he give up what anyone else would kill to have? Wouldn't he kill to put his hands in the threads of the looms, to feel their living warmth, to—
"Someone slap the boy," Atta said. "Chloe sneezed and he caught a glimpse of The Loom. Snap back to yourself, kid. Just like his father. Can't resist a pretty thing."
Jake was about to protest, but the look on the women's faces stopped him. They understood, of course. They knew that it wasn't simple prettiness that was making his eyes burn and his whole body tremble where he stood.
"You want to be excommunicated from the eternal world because of your wife and daughter. Right?" Chloe asked.
"Right," Jake said. Rachel and Lily. Thinking of them cleared his mind like morning coffee.
The two women's eyes met for a moment. "It can be done."
"Go home. We'll discuss this and send for you."
Jake wanted to stay in that room as much as he had wanted to leave it minutes before. If he was ever here again, he swore he would come prepared with pepper and cats and ragweed and every other allergen known to man.
But for now, he gave a clumsy bow and a "Thank you," and he left the Fates and returned to the world.